A Random, Forgotten Tumblr Page

Battles Decided Before They Were Fought: Bosworth, Sekigahara, and the Neglected Historiography of Pre-Battle Alignment Abstract Two battles occupy nearly identical positions in the national narratives of England and Japan. Bosworth Field (22 August 1485) is treated as the terminus of the Wars of the Roses and the founding moment of the Tudor century....

Measuring Absence: Why Combat Participation Rate Requires Decomposition: Perryville, Antietam, and the Causes of Non-Engagement: A follow-up to “Battles Decided Before They Were Fought” Abstract The preceding paper proposed combat participation rate — the share of a mustered force that actually made contact — as a diagnostic tool for identifying battles settled by pre-battle negotiation rather than tactical decision....

A Grand Circuit of Iran: All 31 Provinces Roughly 115 nights (about four months), one continuous counterclockwise loop from Tehran back to Tehran, with almost no backtracking....

Custody Without Guardians: Child Protection in the Entertainment Industry, Examined Against the Long History of the Performer Abstract A short promotional video from 2009, in which a forty-year-old music executive announces to a global audience that he has been "given custody" of a fifteen-year-old singer for a weekend of activity that "we can't really disclose," has been re-examined in the years since its subject's federal prosecution....

The Unbounded League: Barriers to Stability in College Football Realignment and the Conditions Under Which a Durable Alignment Could Emerge: A White Paper Executive Summary College football's realignment cycle is routinely described as chaos, drama, or madness — language that treats instability as a pathology afflicting an otherwise sound structure....

The Rake, the Gentleman, and the Rake Without a Name: Self-Command and Self-Indulgence from Austen’s Regency to the Present Abstract Jane Austen inherited the eighteenth-century figure of the rake and stripped him of his glamour. In Willoughby, Wickham, and Henry Crawford she drew men whose charm is a working tool, whose pleasures are purchased with other people's ruin, and whose defining trait is that they will sacrifice nothing of themselves for anyone....

The Human Toll of the Westport Campaign: An Estimate of Confederate Attrition During Price’s Missouri Expedition, September–December 1864 Executive summary Sterling Price's Army of Missouri entered its home state in mid-September 1864 with roughly twelve thousand men, of whom perhaps a third carried no weapon....

Paper 12 — The Late Twentieth Century and After: Exile, Gentrification, and the Contest over Memory, 1959–Present Introduction This final paper carries the history of Tampa's working people from the mid-twentieth century into the present and, in doing so, draws together the arguments of the whole series....

Paper 11 — Civil Rights and the Bulldozer: Black Freedom and the Destruction of Neighborhoods, 1945–1975 Introduction The postwar decades brought to Tampa two great upheavals that this paper treats together, because they were bound up with each other in the lives of the city's working people and especially its Black community....

Paper 10 — Collapse, Depression, and War: The Unmaking of the Cigar City, 1920s–1945 Introduction The world that the preceding papers described—the booming cigar city, its striving immigrant families, its great mutual-aid societies, its proud and militant craftsmen, its women holding households and institutions together—did not last....

Paper 9 — Women’s Tampa: Wage-Earners, Organizers, and the Backbone of Community Life, 1880s–1940s Introduction Through the eight papers of this series, women have appeared again and again at the load-bearing points of Tampa's history—the Tocobaga women whose shellfish harvest built the middens, the frontier wives who ran the farms while the men went to war, the cigar workers' wives who kept the boardinghouses and pooled the family earnings, the women at the factory bench....

Paper 8 — Vigilantes, Jim Crow, and the Color Line: Repression and Black Survival, 1880s–1930s Introduction The previous paper reconsidered the cigar workers' militancy and its costs. This one turns to the force that met that militancy—the employer-backed repression and vigilante violence that ran through Tampa's history—and to the broader system of racial control, Jim Crow, that shaped the lives of every Black and Afro-Cuban person in the city....

Paper 7 — The Insurgent City, Reconsidered: Radical Labor and Its Costs, 1899–1931 Introduction Ybor City is famous, above all, for its labor militancy. In the standard telling it is a heroic place—a stronghold of anarchists and socialists, a city of strikes, a Latin island of working-class radicalism defying the bosses and the Jim Crow South alike....

Paper 6 — Mutual Aid Without the State: The Immigrant Societies of Ybor City, 1887–1930s Introduction The immigrants who built Ybor City faced the oldest and hardest problems of working-class life: sickness, injury, death, the doctor's bill no wage could cover, the funeral no family could afford, the widow and orphan left with nothing....

Paper 5 — Making Ybor City: The Cigar Migration and the Birth of an Immigrant Working Class, 1880s–1900 Introduction In 1885 Tampa was a small, struggling Southern town of a few thousand people, still recognizably the cracker cowtown of the previous paper....

Paper 4 — A Cracker Cowtown at War: Households, Slavery, and Survival, 1840s–1870s Introduction Between the end of the Second Seminole War and the close of Reconstruction, Tampa grew from a garrison village into a small Southern town—and then was nearly unmade by war....

Paper 3 — Fort Brooke, the Enslaved, and the Seminoles: The American Frontier from Its Margins, 1824–1860s Introduction When the United States built Fort Brooke at the mouth of the Hillsborough River in 1824, it planted the seed of the city that would become Tampa....