More About Brent Nosworthy
By Dana Lombardy
My colleague and friend Brent Nosworthy’s ability to consistently pen military historical classics is not simply the result of formal academic training but also stems from the convergence of five seemingly disparate core competencies. His professional and unconventional life experiences provided him with a powerful set of alternative research methodologies that Brent used to compile his Encyclopedia of European and American Battle Tactics 1453-1867.
The following background information should help a reader to understand why Brent is truly unique and a gifted historian.
Academically Trained
Brent Nosworthy attended undergraduate and graduate school at McGill University, one of Canada’s two most prestigious schools of higher learning. Brent proved to be a brilliant student and when McGill set up its Human Communications Department in the early 1970s, he was invited to join this graduate program along with a small set of select students.
A Wargame Designer
After graduating from McGill, Brent had few employment opportunities in Quebec during the late 1970s. Undaunted, he was able to turn his hobby of wargame design into a career. His efforts were so innovative that he was the first person to be hired directly as a fulltime designer at Simulations Publications Incorporate (SPI.) He would go on to become a principal owner and then president of Operational Studies Group (OSG).
Brent quickly expanded his game design efforts beyond wargaming. He designed a role-playing board game based on ABC’s General Hospital soap opera during the “Luke and Laura” craze that then elevated the program to America’s most popular daytime TV program. In the academic arena he designed Discuton, an instructional game on semiology (verbal and non-verbal skills plus sign using behavior) for the Université du Québec à Montréal.
Historical wargame design became a powerful influence on Nosworthy’s approach to research and writing. To create an accurate simulation, Brent went far beyond the narrative provided in many historical sources and explored primary sources. He assessed what forces were at work, how they interacted with one another, as well as attempting to quantify each of these factors to determine their relative importance. This analytical approach fostered a much deeper intellectual and informational approach than someone simply providing a narrative using secondary sources. Brent found that it forced him to ask many questions that might not be considered by someone with only academic-based training.
An Instructional Designer/Instructional Game Designer
In the late 1980s Nosworthy brought his wargaming design abilities to corporate America. Self-taught, Brent became a highly successful instructional engineer for some of America’s most prominent companies: Pfizer, Bayer Pharmaceutical, Bristol Myers, Merck Pharmaceutical, Ford Motor, BMW, IBM, DEC, AT&T, Lotus, Progress Software, Gillette, Fidelity, American Express, Citibank, and Mastercard.
This instructional design experience influenced his approach as an author of history. Brent approached his books with the emphasis on how to achieve maximum readability and comprehension – just as his business seminars had to be clear and concise.
Other Unconventional Competencies
A Record Collector
On the streets of his beloved Harlem in New York City, Nosworthy was not known for academic prowess or military historical accomplishments but for his vast knowledge of black American popular music and his dancing skills. How did this contribute to his development as a researcher, historian, and writer?
As a young teenager, Brent became interested in rhythm-n-blues and popular black dancing. He began to assemble what would eventually become a world class RnB record collection. Travelling to record stores in New York, Toronto, and Buffalo he developed a system to search through thousands of records quickly and obtain information overlooked by many collectors, such as the writing credits, record number on the label, occasionally even the record company’s address, as well as the appearance of the record, and label to access the time period the record was released. Even the phraseology of the song’s title could determine if that record was RnB or not!
If his time at the university taught Nosworthy to be an academically-trained researcher, record collecting taught him to be a detective using a gamut of unconventional intellectual tools to identify information invisible to traditional scholastic methods.
A Hitherto Unprecedented Bibliography
Repurposing his compulsive urge to collect records, since 2006 Brent spent a great deal of effort accessing key primary source books online. He has been able to access almost all English and French military works that were published during the 1500 to 1750 period, including many that are extraordinarily rare. This huge cache of primary source information would have been impossible to assemble prior to the Internet. His personal archive now includes military treatises in Spanish, Italian, and other languages as well.
Combat-like Experience
Actual combat induces a “fight or flight” reaction. Fortunately, most people never have to encounter this fear. Brent encountered this emotional response through unlikely events after he moved to New York in the late 1970s.
Nosworthy was drawn to funky dance skating, a very popular pastime among the city’s Black and Hispanic populations. He easily made friends and travelled with them to some of NYC’s toughest neighborhoods, dancing at the Skate Key in the South Bronx and at the even tougher Empire Rollerdrome in “kickass Brooklyn.” When authorities attempted to expel the funky dance skaters from Central Park he became a co-founder of the Central Park Dance Skaters Association (CPDSA) and its first president. More than any other person, he was responsible for the continued existence of one of New York’s popular tourist attractions and the city’s most visible interracial community.
Although unintentional, it was inevitable that Brent would eventually find himself caught in spontaneous, life-threatening events that can occur in a huge metropolitan area. Brent found himself in dangerous situations: Fighting between two rival gangs firing shots at one another; intervening between two youths about to stab a tourist who was reaching for a handgun tucked at the in the waistband at his back; or finding himself suddenly in the middle of a riot by youths gathered there to “get paid,” i.e., to rob people.
A Renaissance Man – Writing About the Renaissance and Early Warfare
These events were obviously traumatic to Brent, but ironically, he feels that they contributed a positive effect on him by helping him shape his understanding of some of the most basic aspects of life-and-death situations – similar to the experiences of warfare.
Brent Nosworthy has spent the last eighteen years working on his magnum opus, a 4,000+ page encyclopedia of European and American battle tactics during the age of the arquebuse and musket (c. 1453 – 1867.) I am proud that my Lombardy Studies will publish it as a series of booklets starting in 2025.
In the meantime, Brent is offering a number of these “chapters” and studies in PDF form. Click below to see the PDFs currently offered and read details about each one.