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The WarData.net website and database project were created to study war. The focus is on certain historical aspects about war rather than on weapons, strategy, and tactics. There is a section on the military history of America with a special focus on the 400-year war between the Native American civilization and the colonists of the western European civilizations, and another about the military history of China focusing on development of an ancient military industrial complex. A third section will concentrate on the development of gunpowder, and the development of another, more complex military-industrial complex. Other sections are in progress.
Much of the data from the WarData.net database is displayed in the form of timelines for various wars. There is also the WarData.net World War II Quiz. Soon, there may be quizzes on other wars and other historical subjects. The timelines are chronological lists of the major battles and diplomatic events of each war. Some are more complete than others, and all are works in progress, as is the database in which the information is stored. There are also lists of major wars and battles. A collection of Quotations about War is also available. See the menu at left or the more complete list at the bottom of this page.
Although the WarData.net website contains military history and other historical information, the intention is not to promote war but to understand it.
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Warfare is a subject we would all like to ignore. Unfortunately, it is becoming more and more clear that we cannot ignore it if we want to understand human behavior. Warfare is more common and more involved in shaping human societies than anthropologists have recognized. As unpleasant as it may be to deal with this topic, we cannot objectively begin to understand the past without coming to grips with warfare.
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This quotation applies not just to anthropologists, but to historians, psychologists, and many others in academia and society at large. It seems that many intellectuals tend to discount the prevalence of war in mankind's past, imagining it to be the invention of modern civilizations. This extends to the denial and mislabelling of direct evidence of mankind's obsession with warfare. 2
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1 Steven A. LeBlanc, Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest, (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1999), ix.
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2 In one case, axeheads were described as money in order to avoid labelling a particular set of burials site as a “warrior burials”, even though the burials contained other weapons such as swords, shields, and even chariots. See: Lawrence J. Keeley, War before Civilization, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 18-20.
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The WarData.net website has an entire section on Chinese Military History which contains a number of timelines for the various dynasties. Click on the picture or the heading above, or click here
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| The battle of Changping (260 BCE) was one of the most decisive battles in Chinese history. The forces of Qin surrounded the forces of Zhao on a hilltop and maintained their positions for 45 days. The Zhao troops were unable to break out of the encirclement and were defeated.
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“People are fungible. You can have them here or there.”
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Donald Rumsfeld,
U.S. Secretary of Defense
(January 20, 2001 – December 18, 2006)
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Visit the WarData.net collection of Quotations about War for more brilliant ideas.
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And for those who consider conservatives (Republicans) to be warlike while liberals (Democrats) are wiser and more reasonable, consider this comment during a debate about punishing the Serbs with military action in Bosnia. After Colin Powell gave Clinton a range of military options but expressed doubt about their effectiveness to make the Serbs change their actions, Madeline Albright asked the following question:
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“What's the point of having this superb military that you're [Powell] always talking about
if we can't use it?”
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See Colin Powell's autobiography My American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995), 576.
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About the WarData.net website and database project
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The WarData.net Database project is an effort to list all known historical battles. It soon became clear that creating a list of battles necessitated keeping track of all known wars. Adding wars to the database required the addition of treaties and declarations of war to the database. In order to make sense of these dates, many other events were also added.
As of 08/15/07 the
WarData.net database
(Also known as the “Big Ball of String”)
currently has
28,477 records
each of which represents a historical event, including:
15,199 Battles
and
2,329 Wars
Data assembled but not yet assimilated into the database includes an estimated 2000 battles.
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