Warriors
War of the Flowers
William B. Fawcett Only in the loosest sense, was the pre-conquest Aztec nation a nation in the European meaning of the word. The very concept of nation would have been virtually inconceivable to the average Aztec. He was a Texcocan or a Tlaxcalan. The Aztec nation was, in fact, a patchwork of city states with varying degrees of independence and…
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The War in the Forest I
Military historian Douglas Edward Leach has called 1689 the “year of the great divide, marking as it does the beginning of a series of four major wars whose outcome would shape the whole future of North America.” That year saw the start of the titanic struggle between predominantly Protestant Britain…
The War in the Forest II
In New England, the brief span of peace was drawing to a close. The Abnakis had pledged their allegiance to Queen Anne, but their true loyalties lay with the French. Provoked by the English settlers who kept pushing into their territory, the Indians were urged on by French agents who…
Maori Wars
There had been intermittent fighting with the Maoris for more than a decade; in fact, since colonists first began arriving in numbers on these beautiful but remote islands. The three numbered Maori wars were merely periods of exceptional activity and crisis in a running struggle as Europeans, mostly British, wrested…
Chinese Women Warriors
Seven hundred years before young Scythian women died in battle and were buried with weapons as grave goods, General Fu Hao (ca. 1200 BCE) flourished and fought to defend the Shang dynasty in Bronze Age China (ca. 1600–046 BCE)—the earliest woman warrior I know of for whom we have a…
A NEW KIND OF WAR – Indian Wars
Quanah Parker, c. 1890 Quanah Parker on horseback wearing eagle feather headdress and holding a lance bottom-up. Cavalrymen remember such moments: dust swirling behind the pack mules, regimental bugles shattering the air, horses snorting and riders’ tack creaking through the ranks, their old company song rising on the wind: “Come home,…
FILM: RAN (1985)
Synopsis Ran is a Japanese-French war film/period tragedy directed, edited, and co-written by Akira Kurosawa, adapted from Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear and the legends surrounding daimyĹŤ MĹŤri Motonari. The film stars Tatsuya Nakadai as Hidetora Ichimonji, an aging Sengoku-era warlord who abdicates for his three sons—with disastrous results. Background Akira…