Even without the archduke assassination I believe WWI would have sparked anyways. Many countries were itching for war, and if Austria pushed the serbian oppression more perhaps a bigger incident could have occured and made a worse start.
Honestly though, Ferdinand’s death felt rather predestined.
Which do you all prefer, military history or civilian history?
I think in the end I prefer Civilian history. Military history is enjoyable, but civilian history just engages me more, especially when we dive into philosophy, art, music, and social issues going on at the time. Learning how people thought differently than they do today is engaging and exciting to me.
I like the Mongol Empire. The slaughtering, the absorbing of cultures, and whatnot. Honestly they were kinda the perfect ancient empire until collapse.
Is there a difference? For do they not ultimately feed into each other?
I’m more vested in military history. But I like both.
Me too.
They do, but to continue the river analogy, one is a lot more salty than the other.
i’m more invested in contemporary military history myself, like 18th-century onwards
I actually used to hate any history from the Renaissance onward, but in the past three years or so I’ve gradually become interested more and more to the point where I became engaged with the present, and even the future. I like military history from any point in time, but for civilian history I’m mostly interested in the turn of the 20th century period and into the 20s.
Vastly prefer civilian history, which kinda sucks because most recorded history tends to be military. I feel that understanding the reasons behind the wars is much more important than the wars themselves. In order to understand the reasons, you need to understand the people. Plus looking at civilians allows us to relate to their humanity, and thus emphasize more with them. Basically,
As an aside, you’re leaving out an important branch of history: political history. I know it often follows alongside military history, but it’s important to understand what type of government it was, how it functioned, and why it functioned.
I include that in civilian history. But, that is an important distinction. Do you prefer reading the history of commoners or nobility?
Not really leaving out, more that I forgot to mention it. I love political history as well!
This was too obvious not to make.
Now I disagree with that line of thinking. It seems like you’re very quick to throw things into two camps; military, or non-military,
commoners, or nobility. The thing about history is that it isn’t black and white, it’s a whole spectrum of colors. It’s hard to put these sorts of things into an either-or situation because it’s not two options. There’s economic history, social history, cultural history, etc, and to simply lump everything together into “SHOOT OR NOT SHOOT” seems kinda demeaning. Likewise, sure you can generally sum every person in the world into vague terms like “commoners” and “nobility”. But that’s like summing every person into camps of “has brown hair” and “doesn’t have brown hair.” It works, but it tells you literally nothing about the individuals. Adolf Hitler and Takuma both fall into the former camp, but one is significantly more historically interesting than the other.
It’s also hard to make broad choices like that over the entirety of human history without narrowing it down to a time period. A term like “nobility” has a very different context in 17th century Japan versus 3100 BC Egypt versus 20th century America. WWII is vastly different than the Third Punic War, or the Crimean War, or the Peloponnesian Wars. There are some nobles who I would find fascinating, others who would bore me to death.
tl;dr context matters and broad categories don’t really work
I am, because as you already put:
I was just trying to simplify my question to start a conversation, not make a statement about anything specific. It’d be kind of odd to say “do you prefer military history or the history of the wind instruments in Tang Dynasty?”
Also, there’s a lot of subcategories of military history as well. Just looking at the lives of the generals/officers is drastically different then the life of the average soldier.
I’m not holding a gun to anyone’s head and forcing them to pick. I asked an open ended question. It was broad, yes, but there’s no reason people can’t elaborate with their answer. I tried to elaborate a bit for you with my response, but I guess you’re not having it.
I’ve always had an interest in military history, although in a geeky “Spartans are cool!” way. I doubt I could carry on an in depth conversation about it for too long.
I like political/civilian history, while military seems to be cool, there’s nearly an intrigue to the former. Though if I were to choose a preferred era that I know most about it’d be the cold war, followed by the classical period
I like war history
Which is odd, because I’m typically a mellow kinda guy.
Oh, well.
Anyways, I’m a huge nerd about WWI and WWII.
I know a lot of weapons and vehicles, as well as a few tactics and a couple of major events.
My favorite part of history is the mongul empire tbh