Decipher History

Production Costly! The costs of vising the wreck twelve times for research and footage, not to mention the cost of the film production overall. The extreme profitability of this ...

The movie It was really good! One-shot gimmicks of the past and appreciating the technical complexity of what was done here. People The demographic makeup of the British mili...

Meta Versions! So many versions. The best version of the film: The Ultimate Cut. Setting the scene Ancient Greece after 300. The Peloponnesian War (which Ryan is in the middl...

People Roland Emmerich and Mel Gibson and historical rigor (or lack thereof). Period technologies Rocking chairs! Pushing the edge of period chair technology. Actually a rela...

Language Creating the dialects, idolects, and accents of the five points. Historical Language sleuthing. Daniel Day Lewis’ vocal performance. Historicity “A drama, not a docu...

Isaac Meyer’s History of Japan Podcast!! Japan post-isolation Tokugawa rule. Can historical economics be interesting? The introduction of tightly-controlled Dutch trade in Japa...

One Small Step Worrying the minimum amount about your speech. The difficulty of quoting noisy radio transmissions. Because it is haaaahd Recognizing the small temporal distan...

This film Zach Snyder’s strengths in creating comic book panels on film. Slo-mo blood spatter. Abs and glistening man-meat. Western civilization Ancient Greece and “western c...

Criticisms and controversy So yeah, Mel Gibson is bad. But then the movies are… really good? Trying to get past his framing. The tug of war between historical accuracy and entert...