This archive covers progress within and around the world’s armed forces — from mental health reforms and veteran support programs to technology that reduces harm and policies that improve accountability. These 31 stories highlight what’s working, who’s driving change, and how military institutions are evolving for the better.
Research from Johns Hopkins University finds that MDMA seems to re-open a window of opportunity for social bonding and rewiring trauma-related faulty connections in the brain.
The leaders of North and South Korea have committed themselves to the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and pledged to bring a formal end to the Korean War, 65 years after hostilities ceased.
On January 7, 1979, Vietnamese forces rolled into Phnom Penh and ended the Khmer Rouge regime, closing nearly four years of rule that had killed an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians — roughly a quarter of the population. The road to justice was long, but the day itself broke the nightmare.
The 1864 Geneva Convention was the world’s first codified international treaty that covered the sick and wounded soldiers on the battlefield.
The Tamoyo Confederation took shape along Brazil’s coast in 1554, when Tupinambá chieftains who had long been rivals chose unity over isolation in the face of Portuguese colonization. Chief Cunhambebe was elected to lead alongside a council of four others, coordinating resistance across hundreds of miles of coastline until the alliance ended in 1567.
Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day, 800 C.E., when Pope Leo III placed a crown on the Frankish king inside St. Peter’s Basilica. It was the first such coronation in the West since Rome’s fall more than three centuries earlier, and it set the template for the Holy Roman Empire that endured until 1806.
Hadrian’s Wall began rising across northern Britain in 122 C.E., when the Roman emperor arrived determined to mark where his empire ended. Three legions spent at least six years building the 73-mile barrier of stone and turf, punctuated by guarded gates every Roman mile. It stood as Rome’s northwestern frontier for nearly three centuries.
The Migration Period, roughly 300 to 568 C.E., set hundreds of thousands of people moving across Eurasia — Goths, Vandals, Franks, Slavs, and more crossing rivers and old Roman frontiers. In 406 alone, a coalition of some 200,000 forded the frozen Rhine. From that churn emerged the rough outlines of modern Europe.
The Art of War appeared in China sometime between 500 and 430 BCE, thirteen short chapters that reframed warfare as a costly last resort rather than a path to glory. Its author, known only as Sun Tzu, may never have existed as a single person. Twenty-five centuries later, it remains the most widely read strategy text ever written.
The fire lance, the world’s earliest known gunpowder weapon, first appeared on Chinese battlefields around 950 C.E., and Song troops famously wielded it during the 1132 siege of De’an. A bamboo tube packed with powder and shrapnel, it marked the quiet beginning of a lineage that would eventually lead to the rifle.
