Historian Spotlight - Karl Friday

Karl Friday is one of the few historians out there who has a real "hands on" experience with the subject material that he writes about. He has lived in Japan and trained with the famed Kashima Shinryu.

I admit I had never read a Friday book until recently. Friday was kind enough to help me through my graduate school application process. I figured I owed it to the guy to read at least one of his books. The first book I purchased was Legacies of the Sword: The Kashima-Shinryu and Samurai

This work was extremely well done and it immediately vaulted Friday to the top of my favorite historians list. (Yes, I am nerdy enough to have a favorite historians thread.)

Since then, I have read several other Friday works and his spot among the top of my aforementioned list is secure.

For more info on Friday, check out his faculty page at the University of Georgia

Karl Friday

Historian Spotlight - Thomas Conlan

Thomas Conlan is an Associate Professor of History at Bowdoin College (ME).

Check out his bio here.

Conlan has authored some really great works in recent years. In Little Need of Divine Intervention and Weapons and Fighting Techniques of the Samurai Warrior are two valuable resources for me in my current personal library. Along with those 2 works, Conlan has also authored State of War: The Violent Order of Fourteenth Century Japan.

You can also find him from time to time making appearances for History Channel specials.

Conlan has also done some tremendous work putting together some virtual online scrolls. (I won't go into these that much here because they are going to be discussed in further detail in the near future.) I have already wasted more than a few hours digging through these scrolls and reading over the great information that Conlan has provided for them. You can find these scrolls on the link that I provided earlier in this post.