Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)

[Lemn0c]

Originally Posted by Lord Carnifex

My reading may be colored by Reconstruction, but my impression is that the South viewed [Sherman's March to the Sea] as just short of an atrocity, and even in the North it was percieved as not something "civilized" people do.

Whatever Sherman was doing in Georgia was far outmatched and exceeded (if not in scale, then in passionate intensity) by the kinds of war atrocities being committed by both sides in frontier areas like Missouri and Tennessee, a fantastical sort of one-upmanship against noncombatants that achieved horrific proportions.

My understanding is, one of the reasons General Lee sought the option of formal surrender was the old military gentleman did not want to see his beloved Virginia dissolve into a generation of liquid guerrilla war. He understood there were soldiers under his command like Nathan Forrest ready to fight on for years as vicious payback, without any chance of success for the larger goals of the Confederacy.

Originally Posted by Anthony

Military techniques that demonstrably work rarely die out just because of social disapproval.

Word.

...

On a related note, I’ve often thought an interesting campaign world would be the one laid out in Robert Chambers’ The Repairer of Reputations. Written in 1895, he creates a weird future world of 1920 completely unlike ours of post WWI.