Chinese-American Boxers Before 1900

After 1900, there are a number of reasonably well-known Chinese-American boxers that fought in the western boxing tradition including at least two with variations on the name Ah Wing. The handful of Chinese-American boxers that fought in the 19th century are so obscure as to be unknown. Unfortunately they tended to be unknown in their […]

Vintage Martial Arts Comic Book Ads

A couple years ago, Dan Kelly did a retrospective on the martial arts advertisements found in comic books from the 1950s to 1980s. He breaks it up by advertisers, and you’ll see familiar names there, such as Joe Weider, Bruce Tegner, Count Dante, Ketsugo, etc.

We would like to eventually post something similar with earlier […]

Savate in the United States in 1896

Here’s an article describing an attempt at introducing savate to the New York Athletic Club in 1896. To the best of my knowledge, it never gained much of a foothold in the NYAC. After all, Mike Donovan was the boxing instructor for decades and it is unlikely he would have cared to have competing pugilistic […]

Carnival of Martial Arts #1

Googling around, I realized that there are a number of blogs out there that touch on the martial arts one way or another and I don’t really know about any of them. Therefore, I decided to start a blog carnival and collect submissions from all the bloggers who care to participate. If you blog about […]

Mystery: Did Black Belt Ever Publish This Article?

I had an interesting email exchange the other day. The foremost researcher on H2H/Combatives instructor Dermot “Pat” O’Neill sent an image of page 10 from the January 1967 issue of Black Belt magazine. Here is the page (click on the image to open up to full size):

As you can see, Black Belt announces that the […]

Free (and legal!) Classic Martial Arts Movies Online

They are free and they are online, but I can’t recommend the site without caveat. LikeTelevision (”only better,” they say) is an online site that offers, among other films, such classics as Yojimbo, Rashomon, the Miyamoto Musashi trilogy, and Street Fighter.
Unfortunately, LikeTelevision is seeking subscribers for its full size high quality versions of films, i.e., […]

Dealing with Footpads

I came across this a number of years ago and found it amusing because you see the same discussions today with keyboard self-defense experts describing how they would dismantle hypothetical attackers with their favorite techniques.
This piece was originally printed in the April 28, 1900 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle (p.14). I added the emphasis […]

Bartitsu: An Eclectic Edwardian Martial Art

I was involved with this project, but it was the indefatigable Tony Wolf that took the editorial reins and turned a bunch of list talk into the amazing piece of publishing that became The Bartitsu Compendium. Instead of rehashing it all here, let me quote from the sale site:

The Bartitsu Compendium is a complete guide […]

GoFish to Launch Online MMA Channel

GoFish, which looks similar to Youtube, has announced it is launching a mixed martial arts (”MMA”) channel called “MMA Today” on June 7, 2007. Unlike Youtube’s random viewer uploads, it appears that the MMA channel will assign producers and reporters to shoot professional segments on training, fighter interviews, and, of course, fights (some of which […]

H.G. Lang’s “Walking Stick Method of Self Defence”

While we’re tooling up, I wanted to point out some great reprints and original publications by some of our friends. Kirk Lawson did a great job on his Walking Stick Method of Self Defence reprint, down to matching both the layout and font as closely as possible.
Lang’s method is based upon Pierre Vigny’s la […]

Gearing Up!

We’re underway and will begin releasing both reviews and reprints of rare martial arts books soon.
First on the list will be the earliest English-language source for Kodokan judo, Jiu-Jitsu or Jiu-do: Selection from Kodokwan Method by K. Yamanaka, published in 1918. Not only groundbreaking, but one that is still relevant to judo today (that is, […]