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Cyrano4747 posted:Just based on Nelson's looks I"m going to assume he was the most annoying, goony fucker ever. They probably decided they were better off without having to listen to him droning on and on about ancient roman coins or how telegrams were superior to semaphore or whatever obsessive goons latched onto those days and just let it ride. Iirc, he is credited for keeping Kentucky in the Union. Could be why they let Davis go.
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Feb 11, 2016 01:33
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For a puppy to take on a bull, you need a Colt.
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Feb 11, 2016 01:50
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I just bought another book so I could do truck-chat properly. I don't even have space to put it anywhere. 
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Feb 11, 2016 01:52
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Fangz posted:It's kinda cheating to call it a fight when Davis has the time to walk away, ask two people for a gun, walk back, and shoot Nelson in the heart without warning. Well, it did start as a physical fight. Davis threw a balled-up resignation form at Nelson and Nelson backhanded him. The whole thing was kinda childish and Davis was unhinged.
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Feb 11, 2016 02:03
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EvanSchenck posted:This is going to be another post that is pretty much a summary based on understanding I gleaned from reading a bunch of different books over the years, like Wheatcroft's The Habsburgs, various Alison Weir books, and other secondary sources I don't even specifically remember, but: This is the brief summary of Personal Unions that I never knew I wanted since I started playing EU4 and I wanna say thanks for this.
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Feb 11, 2016 02:17
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chitoryu12 posted:He's got nothing on US Civil War General William "Bull" Nelson. Supposedly his last words were "Send for a clergyman; I wish to be baptized. I have been basely murdered." Did people really talk like that in the 19th century, even when they'd been shot, or was it typical for witnesses to one's last words to edit them into something more flowery?
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Feb 11, 2016 03:36
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Chamale posted:Supposedly his last words were "Send for a clergyman; I wish to be baptized. I have been basely murdered." Probably a little of both. I mean the guy probably asked for a priest but likely was like "get a loving priest this little poo poo done punched my ticket"
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Feb 11, 2016 06:43
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i read a murder trial where the deceased's last words were "the short guy stabbed me" ("o wie sticht mich der kleine / ich hab mein theil gesaget")
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Feb 11, 2016 06:55
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HEY GAL posted:i read a murder trial where the deceased's last words were "the short guy stabbed me" ("o wie sticht mich der kleine / ich hab mein theil gesaget") Germans, floofy as all hell most of the time but when they get down to business they get all the way down to the business.
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Feb 11, 2016 06:57
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FAUXTON posted:Germans, floofy as all hell most of the time but when they get down to business they get all the way down to the business.
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Feb 11, 2016 07:03
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His CO was probably like "GOD DAMNIT BECK HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO loving TELL YOU"
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Feb 11, 2016 07:05
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FAUXTON posted:His CO was probably like "GOD DAMNIT BECK HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO loving TELL YOU" I DON'T CARE WHO STARTED IT I'LL TURN THIS COLUMN AROUND SO HELP ME GOD
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Feb 11, 2016 07:18
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ArchangeI posted:I DON'T CARE WHO STARTED IT sir it's all Beck's fault, that stunted little rear end in a top hat won't stop starting poo poo and stabbing cops
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Feb 11, 2016 07:25
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Btw: Is there any reason it's so hard to find personal accounts from Vietnam on the intarwubs or am I looking in the wrong place or something? E: Good books or shows are much appreciated as well! Tias fucked around with this message at 12:46 on Feb 11, 2016 |
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Feb 11, 2016 12:39
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Tias posted:Btw: Is there any reason it's so hard to find personal accounts from Vietnam on the intarwubs or am I looking in the wrong place or something? World War 2 was a popular, pretty much unambiguously Good war in which America won, so relatively large numbers of veterans were happy to talk or write about it. Vietnam was an unpopular war which America lost. Not much of a market for people to write their reminiscences in the immediate (call it a decade or two) aftermath, and I guess it's long enough ago now that guys who fought in it don't feel the need to write up their accounts of it decades later, especially as it's still a bit controversial.
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Feb 11, 2016 13:17
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There has been something of a rise of interest in the Vietnam War over the past decade or so, especially as World War Two falls further and further out of living memory. It'll probably never be as "popular" as the Second World War, but time has blunted the sting of it, just as it probably will for Iraq and Afghanistan (God help us). The veterans themselves are definitely more willing to talk about it- I've spoken a fair bit with veterans at the air museum I used to volunteer at, including a former Sheridan driver in collections and a Huey pilot who was the author's co-pilot in Chickenhawk. (The museum made a video of him speaking about his experiences, and it's definitely worth a watch)
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Feb 11, 2016 14:29
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Nebakenezzer posted:I don't know, look at those hyphens, that indicates the dude is like a Duke or something. (He was the air attache to America in 1930.) The Hyphenated name is normally a way to preserve a family name that would have otherwise become extinct. If you only had a daughter, when she married she would hyphenate her name with her husbands, keeping her family name alive. This name was then used by their children and it is like having 2 surnames. The practice was a pretty old one and is sort of a feudal way of managing your brand - you could say the brides family were securing their trademark. It was usually a thing only done by the aristocracy but over time double barreled names could be found in any class. Ralph Nathaniel Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, the actor is just someone whose had a lot of ancestors who didn't want to lose their family name, his family are pretty firmly middle class.
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Feb 11, 2016 14:45
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PlantHead posted:The Hyphenated name is normally a way to preserve a family name that would have otherwise become extinct. After a quick search I found that the actor is from a cadet-branch of the family with the peerage.
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Feb 11, 2016 14:55
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Hogge Wild posted:After a quick search I found that the actor is from a cadet-branch of the family with the peerage. Baronetage, not peerage (the difference being that baronets don't get to sit in the Lords).
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Feb 11, 2016 15:02
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Mr Enderby posted:Baronetage, not peerage (the difference being that baronets don't get to sit in the Lords). Nor do most peers these days... (seriously, the House of Lords was a bit weird before Tony Blair came up with a 'reform' plan on the back of a fag packet back in the 90s, but it's very very weird now for something that's an actual functioning part of a First World democracy!)
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Feb 11, 2016 15:05
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Mr Enderby posted:Baronetage, not peerage (the difference being that baronets don't get to sit in the Lords). No, I meant the Baron Saye and Sele title. The Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes baronets is a different title.
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Feb 11, 2016 15:08
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feedmegin posted:Nor do most peers these days... It is pretty weird, but I'd say it mostly works.
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Feb 11, 2016 15:10
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feedmegin posted:Nor do most peers these days... It's a disgrace that this guy couldn't sit in the House of Lords: 
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Feb 11, 2016 15:13
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Tias posted:Btw: Is there any reason it's so hard to find personal accounts from Vietnam on the intarwubs or am I looking in the wrong place or something? Chickenhawk is great, so is Low Level Hell. A Rumor of War is pretty classic and really widely read. Dispatches has a lot of very intimate stuff but it isn't really a memoir as such. Ghosts and Shadows is similar to Rumor of War, not as well written but maybe more entertaining. Acceptable Loss is pretty great and also pretty depressing, it is largely forgotten nowadays. A Vietcong Memoir: An Inside Account of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath is a book that I REALLY wanted to like as it is one of the only examples of its type published in the west but aside from the stuff about the internal politics it just wasn't very interesting to me. The Things They Carried is sort of a novel memoir, it is very good but is pretty widely known. Matterhorn is probably my favorite single work on the era aside from Karnow's history and is in sort of the same vein. bewbies fucked around with this message at 15:32 on Feb 11, 2016 |
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Feb 11, 2016 15:30
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Hogge Wild posted:No, I meant the Baron Saye and Sele title. The Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes baronets is a different title. Oh, right, fair enough.
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Feb 11, 2016 15:49
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Acebuckeye13 posted:There has been something of a rise of interest in the Vietnam War over the past decade or so, especially as World War Two falls further and further out of living memory. It'll probably never be as "popular" as the Second World War, but time has blunted the sting of it, just as it probably will for Iraq and Afghanistan (God help us). The veterans themselves are definitely more willing to talk about it- I've spoken a fair bit with veterans at the air museum I used to volunteer at, including a former Sheridan driver in collections and a Huey pilot who was the author's co-pilot in Chickenhawk. (The museum made a video of him speaking about his experiences, and it's definitely worth a watch) I think the state of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq may have also fed interest due to the similarities between our current conundrum and Vietnam, and looking at firsthand accounts helps provide a better understanding of what the guys on the ground may be thinking. It's also possible that "better understanding" is exactly what has let us talk about Vietnam like this: soldiers' accounts from the war almost unanimously have them being jeered and abused as "baby killers" when they got home, as the war protests had reached their fever pitch and the public was well aware of how hosed up the situation had gotten. Now that a few more decades have passed and a better understanding of PTSD is around, it's easier to talk about experiences during that war without treating the soldiers as inherent villains.
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Feb 11, 2016 15:57
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I remember Philip Caputo's A rumor of War was really good, but a good 15 years since I read it. I think he won the Pulitzer Price that year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Caputo e: And know I'm on a google memoir spree  Anyone read Burwell Puller Jr. memoirs? I don't care if its good, it's a memoir from a soldier in the Vietnam war titled 'Fortunate Son', wich is so. god. damned. perfect.
ThisIsJohnWayne fucked around with this message at 16:04 on Feb 11, 2016 |
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Feb 11, 2016 15:57
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Time for the begging bowl again. 1915: The Pale Battalions is now available for pre-order at Amazon; price in most territories 2.99, release date March 28th. If you enjoy the blog, please do chuck a few pennies in; a solid number of pre-orders does equal a small but useful dollop of cash from sales every month after that. The text is revised and expanded and includes among other things a much improved treatment of the Eastern Front in 1915, which got very badly short-changed in real time. 100 Years Ago Neither rain nor snow nor gloom of night is going to interfere with General Yudenich's, ahem, courageous decision to launch a frontal attack with bayonets fixed against a defended fortress in TYOOL 1916. By rights it should have been quickly filed in the "Hilarious failures" column. We'll have to wait until tomorrow to see where it's actually going to be filed. Meanwhile, the weather breaks over Verdun and the German Brains Trust immediately starts considering a postponement of the big push, scheduled for tomorrow; French intelligence now knows almost everything worth knowing about their plan; General Aylmer has been doing some original thinking down in Mesopotamia and comes up with a plan that does not involve witless frontal attacks; further down in Africa there is a plan involving witless frontal attacks; and Bernard Adams has a particularly cushy billet out of the line at Morlancourt. Book title reference: quote:When you see millions of the mouthless dead By Lieutenant Charles Hamilton Sorley, who was shot by a sniper at the fag end of the Battle of Loos.
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Feb 11, 2016 16:38
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sullat posted:Iirc, he is credited for keeping Kentucky in the Union. Could be why they let Davis go. I'm reading through Sherman's memoir right now and he refers to Davis as "Jeff. C. Davis", the only partial first name abbreviation I can recall. I didn't make the connection as Nelson's killer until right now. Sherman writes about Davis' command a ton and he seems to be a reliable and capable officer that Sherman relies on a lot for important roles. I don't remember Sherman mentioning the Nelson murder.
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Feb 11, 2016 16:42
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feedmegin posted:(seriously, the House of Lords was a bit weird before Tony Blair came up with a 'reform' plan on the back of a fag packet back in the 90s, but it's very very weird now for something that's an actual functioning part of a First World democracy!) Remember when Congress shut down the US for a spell? Ain't no need for nobles for things to get weird.
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Feb 11, 2016 16:58
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JcDent posted:Remember when Congress shut down the US for a spell? Ain't no need for nobles for things to get weird. I mean more in its composition than its actions, which actually work out pretty well by and large. It's mostly a bunch of people appointed for life, plus a small group of people elected from a slightly larger group of people whose whole qualification was something their great great grandad did, plus a handful of religious dudes (only some religions, mind you). At least Congress is elected.
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Feb 11, 2016 17:04
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JcDent posted:Remember when Congress shut down the US for a spell? Ain't no need for nobles for things to get weird. And it got threatened again last year. All it takes is a bunch of petulant politicians to refuse to agree on a budget and the government grinds to a halt for a few weeks until they stop being babies.
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Feb 11, 2016 17:04
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re: memoirs and veterans talking about wars. There's a pretty well recognized pattern for this sort of thing among historians who work with a lot of oral sources. Basically, the closer you are either to the event itself or the end of a normal person's lifespan, the more information you get about it from the participants. In the immediate aftermath people are pretty willing to talk about it because it's crazy poo poo that just happened. As time goes on society in general moves on and they either don't talk about it, or just give very sanitized versions that are acceptable for telling the family - the sort of humorous old soldier's tales or sanitized versions of key moments and victories that leave out their buddy with his jaw shot off drowning in his own blood. As they get older they start opening up again. I'm not well versed in the psychology of it, but the tl;dr I've heard is that people start working out a lot of poo poo in their old age as they see their mortality becoming real to them. I'm most familiar with this from work that close friends have done on the Holocaust. In the years immediately after the war you have some just brutal interviews where you get the worst of the worst. By the time you're into the 80s it tends to be rather formulaic with a general "survivor's account" having emerged that focuses on certain iconic moments and certain vignettes. Given the topics the deaths are obviously talked about, but the most horrific vignettes are usually brushed aside and people will flat out change the subject when it comes to certain aspects of the experience. In the last 10 years or so you're seeing an increasing willingness of the remaining survivors to talk about things that were flat out taboo before. Most notably we're starting to have some real discussion of Jew-on-Jew violence in the camps and the issue of rape. Rape in particular was one of those things that you can pretty much assume would be endemic in that kind of situation but that no one really discussed until relatively recently. The same thing for Jewish exploitation of other Jews in the camps, betrayal and mob violence (often in response to perceived betrayal) among the prisoner populations, etc. This is very generalized, of course. You will always have the exceptional individual willing to write about the ugliest parts of their experience at the moment when everyone else is watching John Wayne movies about punching Nazis. That said, on a general level of "what Grandpa talked about when I was a kid" it generally holds up. As a personal anecdote, my paternal grandfather was in the artillery in the Pacific in WW2, frequently operating right up near the front lines. His guns suffered direct infantry attacks a few times at Okinawa, for example. My dad and his brothers never got much out of him about the war other than stuff like the time he got black out drunk in Japan right after the surrender and almost died of alcohol poisoning, without really getting into details about why a man who wasn't known to drink more than a couple beers a weekend decided to see how much whisky he could fit in his stomach. By the time he was in his 80s and I was going to college for my BA in history he was pretty willing to tell me some really hair-raising stories that his own kids had never heard about.
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Feb 11, 2016 17:07
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It can vary from people to people though. My paternal grandfather (my italian side) never really wanted to talk about his time in the war. The little that he told me made him very emotional: he said that he had been sent to a camp to train, and it came under bomber attack. Some of the officers/NCO tried to keep him and the rest of the recruits in the barracks, but eventually they managed to escape, when one bomb blasted him into a river. He was about to drown when another blast sent him towards the shore, and he recalled seeing bodies all over the shore. He ran away and managed to hide until the end of the war. That's the only story I heard him say, and he was very emotional when he told me what had happened.
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Feb 11, 2016 17:16
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Tekopo posted:It can vary from people to people though. Naturally. Any time you're speaking in generalities about populations that number in the millions you are going to have individuals that don't follow the general pattern.
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Feb 11, 2016 17:37
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Even working in Conscientious Objector memoirs and recorded interviews, you can see the same effects, despite the fact that ostensibly at least, no one did anything violent or (except in some cases) anything they would regret. The immediate post-war memoirs tend towards honesty and anger at the system with a side order of hagiography directed at the "heroes" of the movement, Fenner Brockway, Clifford Allen and the first of the COs to die, Walter Roberts. "Soul of a Skunk" and "the dream of a Welshman in borrowed clothes" are both good examples of this period and style. That kicks into overdrive in the 30s, when memoirs focus more on the dead, the futility of punishment for conscience and the futility of war - understandable with war looming - but the anger at the establishment for the treatment of First World War COs starts to wane in 38-39, I think largely because by that point so many COs were in Parliament, busy setting up conditions for the trial and imprisonment of COs for the next war. Fenner Brockway ends up like this and wrote extensively (on everything) By the time the Imperial War Museum and pacifist movements start to go round the country interviewing people just before they die, the incandescent anger has calmed into reminiscence, and it's only in extreme cases that they still speak about the military system with anger, mostly it's become the resigned calm of the long-term pacifist in the 20th century. Old men chuckling about how they outwitted prison guards and believed that the only good violence was revolutionary violence is always charming, though.
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Feb 11, 2016 18:44
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Reality posted:I'm reading through Sherman's memoir right now and he refers to Davis as "Jeff. C. Davis", the only partial first name abbreviation I can recall. I didn't make the connection as Nelson's killer until right now. Sherman writes about Davis' command a ton and he seems to be a reliable and capable officer that Sherman relies on a lot for important roles. I don't remember Sherman mentioning the Nelson murder. At the time of Nelson's murder, Sherman was way off in Memphis on occupation duty. Davis wasn't under Sherman's command until more than a year later, after Chattanooga.
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Feb 11, 2016 18:50
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From a muster roll I've just finished, ca. 1635: "Georg Böhme, from Mücheln, he's joined the Swedes and that's fine." ("Georg Böhme Von Muchelln ist guttwillig Unter die Schwedischen gangen.") The Saxons are Sweden's enemy here, since they changed sides again in '34. It all worked out for this company though, there's a list of 44 names in the back of people they "received from the Swedes." (Stuff like this, if you repeat it long enough, is probably why there's a solid block of guys from Austria, Styria, and even Carinola in this company, which is otherwise full of Thuringians.) HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Feb 11, 2016 |
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Feb 11, 2016 19:36
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chitoryu12 posted:He's got nothing on US Civil War General William "Bull" Nelson. Jeff  Davis.
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Feb 11, 2016 21:51
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ThisIsJohnWayne posted:e: And know I'm on a google memoir spree I read it years ago. It's definitely worth reading, but it's extraordinarily dark and not really combat-oriented. In my recollection, it's much more about his post-war experiences and his struggles after losing his legs, his left hand and most of his right fingers. I know his widow quite well and worked with her for quite a few years. It's weird to read a description of sex about someone you only know as a 60+ year old woman who's suffered a debilitating stroke.
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