By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 8 November 2025
Tolkien, the Second World War, and Fighting Evil Without Becoming Evil
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Tag Archives: Great War
A Note on the History of Uruguay to 1945
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 29 October 2025
“Banda Oriental del Uruguay” (the Eastern Bank of the [Rio/River] Uruguay) was a zone populated by four main Native tribes, all of them nomadic hunter-gatherers and fisherman, whose chiefdoms were more decentralised assemblages than geographic settlements. The lack of resources and population was among the reasons Uruguay was claimed relatively late by the Spanish, after the arrival of Juan Díaz de Solís in 1516, and remained largely uninhabited for about a century. The first permanent Spanish settlement in Uruguay was the Jesuit mission at Santo Domingo de Soriano founded in 1624. Cattle were introduced into Uruguay about a decade earlier and some farmers entered the territory, but it was only after Uruguay became a strategic flash-point on the contested Spanish-Portuguese frontier later in the seventeenth century that the Spanish started to seriously settle Uruguay.
Roman Eastern Foederati and Arab Monotheism Before Islam
Book Review: ‘Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955’
Northern Ireland Cares Deeply About Israel and the Palestinians. Why?
The Recreation of Israel, War, and Survival
Titanic: Tragedy, Heroism, and a Lost World
The Ideology of Nazism
Nazism: Origins and the Weimar Context
Unravelling the “Kornilov Affair”: The Last Stop Before the Bolshevik Takeover of Russia
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 8 December 2021
General Lavr Kornilov, 27 August 1917
The final key event on the road to the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in November 1917 was the “Kornilov Affair” that took place about two months earlier. Alexander Kerensky had become Prime Minister of the Provisional Government in July 1917 and around the same time General Lavr Kornilov had become Commander-in-Chief. A lot of accounts portray the “Kornilov Affair” as a “reactionary” coup attempt by Kornilov against Kerensky. The reality is very nearly the exact opposite. As historian Robert Pipes summarises: “All the available evidence, rather, points to a ‘Kerensky plot’ engineered to discredit the general as the ringleader of an imaginary but widely anticipated counterrevolution, the suppression of which would elevate the Prime Minister to a position of unrivaled popularity and power, enabling him to meet the growing threat from the Bolsheviks.”[1] Continue reading
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