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Notes -
Very related to this: one of the most immense feelings of envy that I’ve ever experienced while consuming a piece of media came during reading The Western Way of War, a book on the nitty-gritty minutiae of Ancient Greek hoplite warfare from the soldiers’ perspectives. The author is a professor at UCSD or USC or something (although I later learned that he’s more famous as a conservative pundit now, which makes some sort of sense I guess, although this content I personally haven’t engaged with), and in the book, he off-hand mentioned that he had his class dress up in replicas of hoplite armor, hold replicas of hoplite weaponry and shields, and stage a mock battle against one another, in order to have them better appreciate how the physical constraints of hoplite warfare influenced strategy. Anyway, point of all this is to say that even though it’s not even actual warfare, even though it’s not actual martial arts, even though it’s not actually building skills to be mastered — I always wished I could’ve had a professor like that. I’d imagine that a full-fledged “HEMA and the Thirty Years’ War” class would have a longer waitlist than almost all other courses offered at any given university.
Anyway, forgive my blogposting. Just had to get that off my chest.
Just on that description I'd bet money you're talking about Victor Davis Hanson. He's good.
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My university had a shop class. Using power sanders, bandsaw, drill presses, etc. That filled up within seconds of the earliest enrollment window. Students must have preloaded the webpage and then quickly clicked the very moment enrollment opened.
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