American schoolchildren learn about Ethan Allen’s 1775 seizure of Fort Ticonderoga: an important moment early in the Revolutionary War. What’s less commonly talked about is that the man who’d...
2024-02-13 07:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostIn my last post, I wrote about the character foibles of two of India’s Mughal emperors and how ...
2024-01-30 07:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostBack in 2020, I wrote two 2024-01-16 07:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Before the American Revolutionary War, slavery was legal in all thirteen colonies. There were no slave states and free states, no Mason-Dixon line that people fleeing slavery could cross and find f...
2024-01-02 07:00:01 +0000 UTC View PostThe word ‘thug’ arrived in English in the early 1800s to refer to a specific kind of bandit operating in India. The concept of ‘thugee’ (the practices of thugs) soon lodged itself in the An...
2023-12-19 07:00:01 +0000 UTC View PostIn the seventeenth century, an Iraqi named Elias al-Mûsili traveled throughout Latin America, armed with a thick stack of letters of introduction from some very prestigious people. With these lett...
2023-12-05 07:00:01 +0000 UTC View PostThe east entrance to the Iron Age hillfort at Maiden Castle, Dorset, England, makes a really great battlemap for RPG combats. Lucky for us, it also has some really interesting history and archaeolo...
2023-11-21 07:00:01 +0000 UTC View PostIn 1773, failed architect William Mylne fled his creditors in Scotland by absconding to the backwoods of the American colonies: a little shack outside Augusta, Georgia. He had a vi...
2023-11-07 07:00:01 +0000 UTC View PostAugust 14th marks six years of the Molten Sulfur Blog. In all that time, I’ve never missed a weekly update. But I need to think about what the future holds. This blog is not going away – I...
2023-08-08 06:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostIn July, 1861, the U.S. merchant sailing vessel S.J. Waring was seized by Confederate pirates. William Tillman, a black man and the ship’s cook and steward, learned the pirates intended ...
2023-08-01 06:00:03 +0000 UTC View PostChina’s Shang dynasty ruled a Bronze Age proto-state that used a lot of divination to inform the king’s decisions. The pyromancy that Shang officials wielded to understand their world left a ri...
2023-07-25 06:00:01 +0000 UTC View PostThis is probably gonna be my last post on the blog from Archive: Historical People, Places, and Events for RPGs. I still haven't 100% decided what changes I'm gonna make come mid-August an...
2023-07-18 06:00:01 +0000 UTC View PostThrough much of 885 and 886 A.D., a large force of raiders from Scandinavia besieged Paris. An eyewitness account of the Viking siege has survived: the Bella Parisiacae Urbis (Battle of th...
2023-07-11 06:00:03 +0000 UTC View PostLast week we looked at a really complicated (and interesting!) revolt against ...
2023-07-04 06:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostIn 1888, the Swahili coast of what is today Tanzania rose up in revolt against the Sultanate of Zanzibar, triggered by the arrogance and brutality of the sultan’s new German ‘friends’. The re...
2023-06-27 06:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostThis post is brought to you by fellow Patreon backer Colin Wixted. Thanks, Colin – and all of you!
2023-06-20 06:00:02 +0000 UTC
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The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion (its soldiers just called it the ‘six-triple-eight’) was a groundbreaking U.S. Army unit in WWII: the first unit of black, female soldiers America ...
2023-06-13 06:00:03 +0000 UTC View PostSukhothai, in what is today central Thailand, was the capital a Medieval Thai kingdom in the 1200s and 1300s. The city was later abandoned, and by the mid-20th century, the ruins were totally overg...
2023-06-06 06:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostAugust 14th (three months from now) will mark six years of the Molten Sulfur Blog. I’m probably going to institute some changes to the blog at that time. I don’t know what those changes will be...
2023-05-31 06:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostIn February of 1797, a small French military force landed in Wales. It was farce, easily rolled up by the British defenders. Participating in an invasion based on this one – either as an inv...
2023-05-30 06:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostThis post is brought to you by fellow Patreon backer Colin Wixted. Thanks, Colin – and all of you!
2023-05-23 06:00:01 +0000 UTC
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In 1870, the government of China had to send an emergency legation to Paris in response to an incident in a Chinese port. It was an unusual circumstance; this was only the third formal diplomatic m...
2023-05-16 06:00:01 +0000 UTC View PostThieves’ tools are an iconic piece of kit in RPGs. Their nature is often handwaved as “y’know, lockpicks and stuff”. When it doesn’t matter, that’s totally the right call. But specifici...
2023-05-09 06:00:01 +0000 UTC View PostFrom 1250 to 1266, four successive popes worked to sell the Kingdom of Sicily to any capable European warrior-aristocrat who could afford their steep asking price. The trouble was, the papacy didn...
2023-05-02 06:00:01 +0000 UTC View PostFrom 1250 to 1266, four successive popes worked to sell the Kingdom of Sicily to any capable European warrior-aristocrat who could afford the steep asking price. The trouble was, the papacy didn’...
2023-04-25 06:00:03 +0000 UTC View PostThis post is brought to you by fellow Patreon backer Arthur Brown. Thanks, Arthur – and all of you!
2023-04-18 06:00:01 +0000 UTC
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In or around 1030 AD, two women, three babies, and two dogs asphyxiated to death in a farmhouse in a thriving community at the bottom of a canyon in New Mexico. Was this event a tragic accident or ...
2023-04-12 00:59:01 +0000 UTC View PostAndrew Battel was a failed English pirate. Captured by his intended victims, he was forced into convict labor by Portuguese colonial officials in Angola, Africa. He then went on to a varied career ...
2023-04-04 06:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostSocieties have handled the enforcement of laws a lot of different ways in different places and times; the ubiquity of police in the 21st century can make it hard to imagine what other systems might...
2023-03-28 06:00:01 +0000 UTC View PostThis post is brought to you by fellow Patreon backer Arthur Brown. Thanks, Arthur – and all of you!
2023-03-21 06:00:01 +0000 UTC
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