Military History
Road Trip Through History: Old Fort Madison
And now, back to the Great River Road after a brief detour to South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century: We got to Old Fort Madison, outside what I suppose would be called new Fort Madison Iowa, shortly before the site closed. We had driven past the town where we planned to…
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From the Archives: And Speaking of the Siege of Mafeking…
…as I believe we were just the other day, I was recently introduced to a vision of the siege that is very different from Lord Baden-Powell’s casually stiff upper lip. Sol T. Plaatje was a twenty-three-year-old African court interpreter for the Resident Magistrate when the Boers besieged Mafeking, and its African older sister, the adjacent…
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From the Archives: Word with a Past: Maffick
The Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) started badly from the British point of view. British troops, supposedly the best trained and best equipped in the world, suffered a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of Boer farmers. (Anyone else hear echoes of another colonial war that pitted farmers against British regulars?) The only bright…
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