Historical
Butting in the Revolutionary War
For Independence Day, I thought the following account would be an appropriate choice. It is an excerpt from a butting article I am working on (I have collected dozens of these types of accounts) that took place during the Revolutionary War. Butting, in its broadest sense, was headbutting. It was predominantly practiced by African-Americans, and [...]
William Ewart Fairbairn: The Legendary Instructor
Combatives researcher Phil Mathews has put together another excellent biographical article on yet another combatives pioneer. This time the subject is none other than William Ewart Fairbairn, possibly the biggest name in the field. Fairbairn spent time in the Royal Marines in the 1900s, the Shanghai Municipal Police in the 1920s, then taught combatives at [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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