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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pielorinho" data-source="post: 297682" data-attributes="member: 259">Shark, I don't doubt that it's well-written and evocative; I just doubt that it's informative.Mr. Leckie, incidentally, got the story about "infantry" from his fellow marines.  You see, the real etymology of "infantry" implies that foot soldiers are children, so the marines have a folk-etymology going around amongst them.  One night while they were bivouacing during basic training, one of the privates in Mr. Leckie's platoon was shooting off at the mouth, and passed the folk etymology on to Mr. Leckie.  He saw no reason to doubt it, so he included it in his book.I bet you're wondering how I know that.  I'd give you my sources, but honestly, they're too numerous to list. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />I told my girlfriend about this historian who doesn't provide a bibliography because his sources are too numerous.  She's got a masters in history.  Here's what she looked like when I told her this:  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f644.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":rolleyes:" title="Roll eyes    :rolleyes:"  data-smilie="11"data-shortname=":rolleyes:" />   And that's the point.  Had Mr. Leckie listed his sources, we could judge them for ourselves.  Since he didn't, he may as well have gotten that factoid from a drunken NCO, or from the tooth fairy, or from his butt.  We have no way to know.  That's why academics like bibliographies and footnotes.I've done a bit of googling, and I can't find any page that provides the same etymology for "infantry" that he suggests.  While I can't, of course, confirm that Mr. Leckie heard the definition around a campfire, it seems likely to me.  He may have read it in a fanciful book and not bothered to check his facts.In any case, I'm not suggesting that his book is bad source material for a D&D game:  he's definitely got a dramatic, heroic, epic writing style, from the quotes y'all've provided here.  But given that the first factoid of his that I bothered to look up turned out to be false, I'd not give much credibility to *anything* he wrote unless I could confirm it from other sources.Okay, my girlfriend is back, with a book recommendation:  <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375702628/qid=1028776934/sr=2-2/ref=sr_2_2/002-6833877-0158457" target="_blank">The Name of War</a>, by Jill Lepore.  It is, according to the Boston Globe,  "Brilliant...Lepore's grasp of the complexities and varieties of the human beings in her drama matches that of a fine novelist....this is history as it should be written."  It uses primary sources, is extensively documented, and follows the rigorous standards academia uses to evaluate scholarly works, to separate the wheat from the chaff.  I think it's probably at a higher reading level that Mr. Leckie's book, but if you're interested in accuracy over adventure, it's probably the better place to turn for a history of the Indian Wars.Semper veritas,Daniel</blockquote>

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