Entry 0: The Beginning
To those who read this, I hope this day finds you well.
I am Ted, and I will be studying the relationship between war and culture for my senior project. To begin with, war and culture are broad topics, so where will I begin? Well, I need a good sample size, but we only have one planet, with one interconnected civilization. With the constraints of a limited sample size, I pulled out Europe and East Asia as my main targets for comparison, and since the topic is quite broad, I will narrow down Asia to specifically China, as they have remained very isolated from the rest of the world, even in comparison with neighboring countries. Another reason I chose China was because I speak chinese, and hopefully that will make research easier.
The main thing I will be looking at is a timeline of major cultural shifts and movements, overlayed upon a map of major military movements and changes. On this map, I will specifically be searching for any trends of culture or war that occur, seeing if cultural trends could predict wars, so that governments can have more time to
Anyways, with all that info dumping out of the way, I can get in to the cool stuff: why I chose this.
You see, military strategy is really fun and cool. As a kid, I read lots of stories about ancient chinese generals and how they won wars, which led me down many rabbit holes of research. As I grew up, I diversified into other generals and famous battles, with my favorite being the Punic Wars. I just find it really neat, you know?
With that out of the way, I will be working independently for the coming weeks as I research the correlations between war and culture. I will mostly be looking over historical sources and others’ research, as well as making and comparing timelines of events, so hopefully you won’t find that too boring. Welp, I hope you enjoyed reading this, because my coming entries will be far more interesting!
Have a good day, and I’ll see you in my next entry.