Information about warriors from all over the world

by EmbarrassedCalendar1

I'm teaching a high school class and we are doing a research project about different warriors throughout the world. Does anyone know any know of any good resources, books, websites, etc. that have good information about different warriors, their communities, philosophy, etc? The project would be comparing knights to samurai to Mughal warriors, for example. Just looking for more types of warriors.

EdHistory101

Hi there anyone interested in recommending things to OP! While you might have a title to share, this is still a thread on /r/AskHistorians, and we still want the replies here to be to an /r/AskHistorians standard - presumably OP would have asked at /r/history or /r/askreddit if they wanted non-specialist opinion. So give us some indication why the thing you're recommending is valuable, trustworthy, or applicable! Posts that provide no context for why you're recommending a particular podcast/book/novel/documentary/etc, and which aren't backed up by a historian-level knowledge on the accuracy and stance of the piece, will be removed.

Morricane

On the subject of samurai, I did recently read two current books.

One would be Michael Wert's "Samurai: A Concise History." As the title says, it's a bit on the short side for a survey work; however, the knowledge is up-to-date and well-presented. It's also inexpensive. He focuses more on culture and society than on warfare, which might be a plus for you - in general, I can recommend it. The only downside is that he doesn't really discuss pre-medieval warriors (which seems to be a symptom of all survey works on this topic). His list of suggested further reading also is quite good.

The other recent book on the same topic would be Lopez-Vera's "History of the Samurai." It's much longer, but not as eloquently written (in part due to being a translation from Spanish). Also, only the latter half of the book are good - the first chapters (esp. that on Kamakura) are reliant on a somewhat outdated view on the period and astoundingly contain a handful of factual mistakes which I've otherwise only seen on wikipedia (all sources he references on this part are from 1990 and earlier and no Japanese research at all, unfortunately). But his depictions of Japan ca. 1500 onward - the author's field of research - are pretty good and make a nice addition to Wert's book. Especially also because he includes the warfare in his accounts to larger degree.

There are more out there, but otherwise I only know academic or more specific books. Out of the latter, I can recommend William Wayne Farris' "Heavenly Warriors" and, in general the books by Karl Friday. Both focus on classical and early medieval period (i.e., 500-1300-ish) warriors exclusively, and are more academically oriented publications.