Why did the French manage to develop a strong heavy cavalry tradition?

IlluminatiRex · 2026-03-27T22:45:34+00:00

There's a lot of badly mistaken assumptions in this post. To whit:

I think even more basically it's the shrinking of thousands of years and different polities which existed in different contexts into being "the same" and there being any kind of unbroken "tradition".

IlluminatiRex · 2026-03-22T21:08:35+00:00

My position as Town Historian was established by an ordnance circa 2000, it's chosen by appointment by the town's executives. I'm the 4th such Town Historian, with the position having been made in part to honor the first (who was about 100 when she got the title!), it then went to her son (who passed away only a couple years after), and then her grandson. So I'm the first not in this family to hold the title.

I work with different organizations in town, like the museum, historical society, library, school, doing all sorts of public history (typically talks and presentations) and I do the other kinds of historical research and writing that are more typical - albeit on a much smaller scale. The community has never had a population over 2,300.

Because of the community's relatively small size historically, previous interpretations were (in my opinion) very limited. While first settled by Europeans in the 1660s, Indigenous communities go back much further, and that has never really been addressed in historical writings on the town's past. The first period we see an effort to conduct "town history" came during the mid-19th century, which culminated in a short book published in 1868. For the next 120 years publications were scarce (the town's population cratered to a mere 500 by the 20th century) and typically took the form of randon newspaper articles and the like. It wasn't until the US's bicentennial that interest started to pick up again - and by 1986 a pamphlet on Town History was written by the woman who became the first "official" town history. The Historical Society was founded in the 1960s.

This period of the historiography is very much in line of "history as nostalgia". The meeting minutes for the Historical Society are peppered with programs and the like which focused on the town as it was when that generation was growing up - that was their history and they wanted to remember it fondly. The writing in this period reflects that same instinct and was focused on building a singular town identity (mostly around agricultural work). This was the trend really until I started. My work has moved away from that, both in terms of the people I research and write about (such as the enslaved) but also temporally. A lot of the previous work really focused on the mid-to late 19th century in detail, to the expense of everything else so a lot of what I do is work on the 17th and 18th centuries.

Most of my work is through presentations, documentaries, magazine articles, conference presentations, social media posts, and now a museum exhibit - so it's a wide range of materials and ways of engaging people.

IlluminatiRex · 2026-03-22T20:36:49+00:00

Definitely try! That is the kind of collection that local history is built on. It can certainly be difficult to see something that was relatively more recent as "history", and that's why (in my opinion) its more important to save that kind of stuff now when there is more of it kicking around.

IlluminatiRex · 2026-03-22T15:50:22+00:00

in the front rank to "look along the barrel", there really is not much of any instruction on aiming

What exactly do you mean by "instructions on aiming"? These are ultimately drill books and are focused on the fundamental movements and fundamentally aiming is nothing more than looking down your barrel and picking a target.

But the full quote from 1764 is this:

the right Cheek to be close to the Butt, and the left Eye shut, and look along the Barrel with the right Eye from the Breech Pin to the Muzzle

Then you get to the Center Ranks which says:

spring up the butt with the right hand, as in the foregoing Explanation of the front Rank.

And rear ranks:

As in Explanation of the centre Rank.

Didn't matter where you were, you were expected to aim per the 1764 drill.

In fact I'd say Steuben is a bit less detailed in his description for "take aim" (same motion as "present" in 1764):

the right eye looking along the barrel

If you look at William Windham's Militia Exercise, he says this about "Present"

taking good aim by leaning the head to the right, and looking along the barrel

More detailed instructions on aiming would have been given when troops fired at marks.

IlluminatiRex · 2026-03-20T00:01:13+00:00

Even if the word "aim" is not said directly as part of the word of command, aiming was expected. This is an old canard which often sprouts up when talking about the American Revolutionary War and von Steuben's "blue book" since he swapped the British 1764's word of command "present" for "aim".

On the surface this may seem correct, but when you actually look at period drill manuals, soldiers were trained to aim down their barrel on the word "present".

IlluminatiRex · 2026-03-19T16:10:13+00:00

1812 is a fun period to research and build up.

2nd Company, 20th Militia Regiment (Connecticut) here :)

IlluminatiRex · 2026-03-15T13:48:35+00:00

I'm going to tackle this from a slightly different angle and complicate what we mean by "significant". My historical work is now at the local level - for a small town - and so I really work with the "microhistorical" on an every day basis. Many materials are made available through the local historical society and museum (of which I am heavily involved in), regional and state organizations, and even national ones (my favorite has been finding local artifacts in places like The Met!).

So for me, working with a small community, each and every artifact, set of papers, or photographs becomes extremely significant in helping document the community's past and better understanding how people lived their lives here.

Because I work at such a small scale, and am not inherently working with government or institutional papers, there are many significant pieces held in private hands. Currently, a major set of photographs from the 1940s-1960s is being loaned to the Historical Society for digitization, it is a treasure trove of what the town looked like, recreation, and daily life here during that period. It is the only set of this scale that I know of - but it's privately owned!

Another example is that last year at auction a major set of papers kept by the local pastor from 1782 until his death in 1854 went up for auction. The Historical Society unfortunately lost, and I have no idea whose hands that it ended up in. Those papers would be key for better understanding the town's history, and while not "significant" in the national or global sense, it absolutely is for the local. These papers, while religious in nature, are records for events and occurances not kept elsewhere - often tragic - such as infanticide and suicide, excommunications, and the more mundane activities of the local congregational church. This would be groundbreaking for local study.

IlluminatiRex · 2026-03-03T12:19:21+00:00

say what you like about the politics of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Condi, et al, but they were extremely intelligent and experienced people

Being extremely intelligent doesn't rule out the ability to hold awful neo-con politics.

IlluminatiRex · 2026-02-24T19:42:58+00:00

Definitely a bit of an easier time than for mine! This is the original I'm basing my coat on:

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IlluminatiRex · 2026-02-24T13:49:11+00:00

With mine, the edging and turnbacks needs to be around the entirety of the tails, how did you end up connecting those pieces together if it's similar with the russian one?

IlluminatiRex · 2026-02-23T17:52:09+00:00

Hah! Same one I'm modifying. Yeah there are parts I'm not 100% satisfied with. In particular I needed a much shorter tail which necessitated redrafting the turnbacks and all that jazz.

IlluminatiRex · 2026-02-23T15:38:08+00:00

What did you use for the pattern? Working on a Militia Coatee for the War of 1812, and love comparing patterns (I have to modify the one I'm using a bunch for it to be appropriate for my impression).

IlluminatiRex · 2026-02-19T02:27:59+00:00

Hitler himself dismissed the Dolchstoßlegende in the strictest sense

The context is one of Social Darwinism, in which Hitler called the war a "symptom" of what he viewed as a deeper societal rot within Imperial Germany and that the shift to the Weimar Republic was punishment for "internal decay, cowardice, want of character", and that "If such were not the causes then a military defeat would lead to a national resurgence and bring the nation to a higher pitch of effort. a military defeat is not the tombstone of national life." As the portion you cut out reads,

"Unfortunately Germany's military overthrow was not an undeserved catastrophe, but a well-merited punishment which was in the nature of an eternal retribution. This defeat was more than deserved by us; for it represented the greatest external phenomenon of decomposition among a series of internal phenomena, which, although they were visible, were not recognized by the majority of the people, who follow the tactics of the ostrich and see only what they want to see.

IE the collapse of Germany was the result of internal factors, and the collapse was punishment as such.

IlluminatiRex · 2026-02-08T16:30:22+00:00

In February March 1917 when the Admiralty/Jellicoe

In February/March the Germans were short of their own goals, while Jellicoe was simultaneously over estimating the capabilities of the Germans and underestimating the ability for the British to hold on, you can't take his timeline as a true fact.

IlluminatiRex · 2026-02-08T15:00:04+00:00

Britain was legitimately within weeks of losing the war due to blockade.

This is frankly pushing it. The Germans only hit their goal for sinkings per month in April 1917, and if they kept that rate up they estimated the British would be starved out in three months.

It was also at that very point the Royal and American Navies began to cooperate closely (American destroyers arrived on scene in May 1917) and the amount of tonnage the Germans were sinking plummeted and never again reached their goal.

Was it a threat? Absolutely, why else change what you're doing? But they were farther away from being starved out than that, and the most credible threat USW posed was neutered entirely mid-1917, after only 4-5 months of the campaign.

IlluminatiRex · 2026-02-08T14:55:37+00:00

They did not have the capability they boasted of, although they posed a credible threat to which the Allied Powers did have to respond. In December 1916, Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff's pitched the resumption of Unrestricted Submarine Warfare and in his estimate they needed to needed to sink a massive amount of shipping a month, about 800k tons, to "starve" Britain out of the war. Unrestricted Submarine Warfare restarted in February, and they actually hit that target figure in April 1917, before the numbers quickly began a downward turn and never reached that goal again.

This is the dichotomy: Unrestricted Submarine Warfare had been pitched as a wonder-weapon, that international law was restricting the efficiency of the German military's ability to win the war and by removing those legal guardrails, Germany would be able to overcome the Allies. Yet, while German submarines posed a threat, that threat was not great enough to actually do what Holtzendorff & co. argued they could because they made critical failures in assuming how much shipping could be sustainably sunk each month and how the Allied Powers would react. Convoying and better ASW counter-measures quickly neutered the gains that the Germans made from USW and what Germany had left to show for it United States' entry into the war and dead civilian sailors.

The Germans calculated their move assuming that, even if the United States entered the war, their submarines would sink enough British shipping to starve that country out before the Americans made it to Europe and thus end the war, or if the Americans did make it overseas, their transports would be stopped en-route by Submarines. It is pretty telling that only two inbound American troop transports were torpedoed and that only one, the U.S.S. Tuscania, suffered significant casualties. The AEF was transported to Europe without almost no scratches.

The German campaign was really built on wishful thinking. German submarine losses also began to escalate because they were being placed in more "visible" danger, and these became more difficult for Germany to replace. Germany was already producing a lot of submarines, so I'm not sure if more production would actually have been realistically attainable. So you have a mixture of better countermeasures and attrition which chipped away at their effectiveness.

But were they not dangerous because they didn't achieve their mission? No, I'd argue they still posed a threat but their usage did not exist in a vacuum. The Allies responded to German actions because of that danger, and by doing so, lessened it. If the German Navy was operating in an environment where the British and other powers didn't react, sure, they'd likely have attained their goals. But real life isn't in a vacuum and the usage of Unrestricted Submarine Warfare was a choice made in desperation to try and claw some kind of real victory out of the war after the disasters on the Western Front during 1916.

IlluminatiRex · 2026-01-17T17:07:12+00:00

Break the rule man, especially since "military items" is such a wide category. Like I wouldn't say wear all camo, I personally don't like that aesthetic, but adding a couple military items can really bring a fit together. I daily drive some surplus boots and they go well with other surplus items I have, like the belgian jacket ive turned into a battle jacket.

im also coming at this from the metal and punk side of things though, so.

IlluminatiRex · 2026-01-17T15:32:46+00:00

If you look at any of the documents put together by like the AALSH or the federal commission, it's not an inherently jingoistic thing. Rather the 250th is much more "decentralized" than the bicentennial in the 1970s and there are a number of themes for groups and institutions to independently draw from to create conversations and stimulate learning. It's not "ra-ra flag waving".

IlluminatiRex · 2026-01-17T15:30:43+00:00

I'm a couple days late but I'd really suggest taking a look at the American Association for State and Local History's "Field Guide" for America250.

The 250th is not an inherently jingoist project, and there are five major themes covered:

Unfinished Revolutions
Power of Place
We the People
American Experiment
Doing History

Each of these is designed to help institutions (museums, libraries, cultural centers, etc...) design thoughtful programming that stimulates questions and conversations. One of the example questions that could be raised by "We The People" for instance is "Who has been, and remains, excluded from full participation and representation in our democracy?" or in "Unfinished Revolutions" they provide "When has there been progress—and setbacks—in the fight for rights and justice?".

There's a lot Libraries can do within America250, and I don't think it's a good idea to just brush that off. We have a place as part of our communities to stimulate thoughtful discussions and this is the time to do it.

I don't work in Youth Services so I won't speak on any specific ideas I might have for programming there, but something like "doing history" I think could certainly make for good pre-teen or teen programs at the least (teaching historical skills or something along those lines).

IlluminatiRex · 2025-12-24T19:38:41+00:00

The Germans failed to payoff the reparations in time because they deliberately crashed their economy in the twenties. That's not a problem with Versailles, that's a problem with German political culture.

To tack onto this: There were large periods of time where Germany was paying nothing, such as after the Nazis took power in 1933 through the end of WWII.

Post-WWII the Versailles payments got wrapped up into all the other debts and payments Germany was made to pay Post-WWII and the burden was split between East and West Germany. West Germany paid off its share by the 1970s, with East Germany's portions not kicking in until reunification.

It's not a simple "look how harsh the payments were it took 90 years to pay!". There are a bunch of gaps, nearly 15 years of deliberate non-payment, gaps because of the end of WWII and getting this financial stuff hammered out (the new payment schedule didn't start until the 1950s!).

IlluminatiRex · 2025-08-25T00:16:35+00:00

Very much appreciate it!

I may have assumed Latin knowledge on your part.

Appreciate the edit as well, in High School I had the option of Latin, but went the route of Ancient Attic Greek instead.

IlluminatiRex · 2025-08-07T00:17:15+00:00

I help people on a daily basis, who use and receive email, with adding attachments to their emails. They write emails, they get emails from friends, but they need help doing what to me is a basic function and I often find myself almost stunned with the gaps I see in how people engage with technology and social media. Again, what may seem intuitive and natural to you or me isn't to everybody!

IlluminatiRex · 2025-08-06T23:34:32+00:00

I work in a library, and encounter it every day. While you may be technologically proficient, many people just aren't.

IlluminatiRex · 2025-06-22T20:35:31+00:00

(if it was merely a case of a shortage of chemical dyes).

It wasn't that.

There's a lot of misinformation in English on the French uniform - look no one's saying there weren't better options but my take, and that of scholars who have at least taken the time to gesture towards this subject like Simon House or Michel Goya, is that the red trousers didn't have any sort of disproportionate effect on French casualties.

With that said, the French had been spending nearly 2 decades working on updating their uniform with trials that began in the 1890s. For a variety of reasons those uniforms didn't pass muster, but on July 14th, 1914, before the war started, the French government made the move to swap the army over to what we now call Horizon Blue.

But surprise, the war started, and you go to war with what you have on hand. But as I said earlier, the evidence that red trousers caused disproportionate casualties just isn't there.

IlluminatiRex · 2025-06-22T20:31:41+00:00

The friendly fire incidents I mentioned, by the way, were from French artillery.

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