Author: mhancock

As the result of teaching many years of introductory college history courses, I have tried to keep fresh in the literature. In teaching this course, I have begun to think that the history of Native Americans in the United States is missing a very important conclusion from the data: that our understanding of “tribal society” represents…

I wrote this blog post for the Central Eurasian Studies Society in 2015 and with the passing of their blog, this post has no home. With the ephemeral nature of the Internet, aren’t I just delaying the inevitable? Can the subaltern draw a map? This post attempts no answer to the question, but rather illustrates…

(This blog post I wrote for the Central Eurasian Studies Society in July 2015 has now become an excellent lesson in the ephemeral nature of the Internet. When I wrote it almost ten years ago it was to celebrate the availabilty of a set of maps, digitized and available from a University in Sweden… and…

Previously I wrote that I would use the blog for writing practice, more specifically for writing things outside the scope of my dissertation. Today I am making an exception: this is an attempt to write coherently about the subject of my next dissertation chapter. My next chapter is about the poem/song now commonly known by…

Johan Gustaf Renat (1682-1744) was an amazing historical figure, a Swedish man with an uncanny skill for survival in strange environments who traveled further afield into Turko-Mongol territory than practically any other European in his generation. He has left an interesting trail of documents and traces in others’ accounts of the time, but still one…

Traditions are crafted. Which is to say that they do not arise spontaneously out of the thin air, though the specifics of the tradition probably are generated spontaneously from the creativity of those acting out the tradition. In the case of a family, there is little like a tradition to give a sense of history…

“Why are you studying the history of the Kazakhs?” I heard this question many times and it deserves a better answer than I have given in the past. First, I would indicate that the question generally is no more specific than the above. In other words, there is no interest in why I’m studying the…

This post is perhaps more rambling than some… I have several areas where my hobbies and my academic interests intersect. Since childhood I have loved strategy-based board games and other “war” games on the computer or other video game systems. I believe that that is what fuels my continued interest in military history. My love…

First, a digression: several centuries ago, the English language was quite a different beast. I love to look through the entries at the online etymological dictionary for insights into the changing vocabulary of English as a means to getting at the change in thinking patterns over time. Many times it is the most mundane or boring words…

This post represents a thought process and maybe some conjectures. In various historical sources pertaining to the history of the Russian Empire prior to 1900, the means of travel are often obscured in secondary and tertiary sources (monographs, textbooks, articles, etc.), which would explain why this conjecture struck me as being partially novel. However, earlier…