Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Cornwallis and his troops were holed up on the bluff of Yorktown village, which was set above the broad, gleaming expanse of the York River, with the town of Gloucester lying directly across the water. This bucolic spot was more salubrious than the low-lying swamps nearby. Most British troops stayed behind the main fortifications, but Cornwallis
... See moreRon Chernow • Washington
In return for the promise of ‘a faire Portugal maiden’ Ala-uddin Shah connived at this move to the extent of detaining a Portuguese emissary who might have alerted his fellow countrymen.
John Keay • The Honourable Company: History of the English East India Company
Kesselring, with sixty thousand troops, had held back two Allied armies for thirty-eight days, inflicting twenty thousand casualties at a cost of twelve thousand.48
Jean Edward Smith • Eisenhower in War and Peace
New York
Melanie Levitin • 1 card
Nizam ul-Mulk was an ingenious general but an even more talented statesman, using bribery and intrigue to achieve what his old-fashioned and outmoded Mughal armies could not. While breaking from the direct control of Delhi, he made a point of maintaining his nominal loyalty to the Mughal Emperor, and throughout the eighteenth century the people of
... See moreWilliam Dalrymple • White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India
Rebellion
Rupnisha Das • 1 card
The action itself ranges across the world, beginning in the eighteenth-century North American wilderness. There the opening markers are the deaths of British general Edward Braddock and more than a thousand of his troops in 1755, ambushed by a very small Franco-Indian force, and the formation of a colonial ranger unit better able to wage such
... See moreJohn Arquilla • Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits
Ownership
Josh Denver • 2 cards
Wavell had a gift for picking good people. One was Major Ralph Bagnold, an officer in the Royal Signals, one of a select band who knew and respected the great desert that lay behind the cultivated coasts of North Africa. Bagnold had been exploring the Sahara since 1926. He had improved the sun compass for desert navigation, discovered the best way
... See more