Word With a Past
Word With A Past: Guerrilla Warfare
Guerrilla tactics are probably as ancient as war itself. The word itself dates from the Napoleonic wars, a product of the Peninsular War of 1808-14 in Spain—the most prolonged and, with the exception of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, most destructive campaign of the period. Napoleon’s invasion of Spain had its official roots in long-simmering tensions…
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Word(s) With A Past: Left and Right as a Political Metaphor
As some of you may have noticed, here in the United States we’re coming to the end of a long, weird election season. A lot of labels have been thrown about with little reference to what they mean or why. At some point, when I had become almost numb from the rhetoric, it dawned on…
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Contrabands
Over the course of the last year I became familiar with the use of the term “contrabands” to describe escaped slaves in the American Civil War. Like many terms of the period, it seemed self-explanatory, in an ugly way. A symptom of the racism that was fundamental in the Union as well as in the…
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