Boer Badass

May 20, 2013
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 “Of all the Boer generals, 37-year-old (Louis) Botha was the prodigy.” — Thomas Pakenham, “The Boer War” Louis Botha was the commander of the Transvaal Army in the Anglo-Boer War, a daring, resourceful and determined warrior. And, like his compatriot Jan Smuts, he proved equally impressive as a post-war statesman, leading South Africa into a [...]

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Canadian Uprising?

May 16, 2013
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The discontent and frustration reflected in the protests of Idle No More are simmering dangerously. At least that’s the conclusion of a former Candian military man in a think-tank report. This from Al-Jazeera English (because you won’t see it on CNN): Living standards for indigenous people on par with “third world” countries, buttressed by a [...]

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Ballads of the Frontier Partisans — John Riley

May 14, 2013
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The story of John Riley and the San Patricios (The Saint Patrick Battalion) is one of the most poignant in the annals of the Frontier Partisans. Irish immigrants who joined the U.S. Army during the Mexican War faced discrimination and brutal treatment at the hands of a Protestant officer corps that nursed an ancestral distrust [...]

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Frontier Partisan Cinema — Black Sails Unfurled Next Year

May 9, 2013
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  The Spanish Main was once the vastest, richest and most strategically significant American frontier. The buccaneers who sailed with the likes of Captain Sir Henry Morgan were every bit as much a force of Frontier Partisans as any ranger band. They were guerrilla warriors of the sea, sometimes sailing as privateers under the auspices [...]

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Frontier Partisans Cinema — Alone, Yet Not Alone

May 9, 2013
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Ralphus at Flintlock & Tomahawk has put up another bit of interesting news. Seems there is a new movie coming out sometime this year set during the French & Indian War. “Alone Yet Not Alone” is based on a popular novel of the same title. The author has novelized a family story of her German [...]

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The Last Gunfight

May 8, 2013
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The gunfight at the O.K. Corral seems to exert an eternal fascination. Barrels of ink and miles of celluloid have been committed to the legend and history of the events surrounding the October 26, 1881, showdown in Tombstone and its grim and bloody aftermath. Do we need another Tombstone book? Journalist Jeff Guinn apparently thinks [...]

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First European visual depiction of ‘Los Indios”?

May 4, 2013
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The Vatican has apparently revealed what is believed to be the first European painting of the Indians — dating to just two years after the first voyage of Christopher Columbus. From The Telegraph (UK): The group of tiny figures was discovered during the restoration of a magnificent fresco, owned by the Vatican, which depicts Christ’s Resurrection. [...]

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CSI: Jamestown

May 2, 2013
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  From the Los Angeles Times this morning: The early American settlers called it “the starving time,” and accounts of the winter of 1609-1610 were so ghastly, and so morbid, that scholars weren’t sure if the stories were true. George Percy, then president of the English settlement of Jamestown in Virginia, wrote that settlers ate [...]

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Orphan. Outlaw. Original.

April 28, 2013
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Spring has sprung here in Central Oregon. After a weekend of good, hard physical work and a late Saturday night of music, I was looking for a worthwhile way to kick back for an hour and enjoy a warm afternoon without doing anything. I pulled a chair up in the garage, looking out on the [...]

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Explorers of the Nile

April 23, 2013
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The quest to find the sources of the Nile River consumed mid-19th Century Britain. It ticked off a whole bunch of cultural and psychological boxes for the Victorians: Adventure in far-flung, exotic places; obsession with geography; the delicious thrill of white men descending into a savage world (with certain carnal possibilities to be hinted at [...]

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