Lucian Staiano-Daniels

About

Lucian Staiano-Daniels is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers During the Era of the Thirty Years War (Cambridge University Press, 2024). As a historian, he is interested in the structural similarities in warfare between the early modern period and the present day. He comments on modern international affairs for magazines such as Foreign Policy.

Staiano-Daniels conducts research on the history of violent conflict during the early modern period (1500–1700), focusing on the daily lives of common soldiers and the women with them. Because many of these people were illiterate, or the writings they left behind often did not survive, his methodology includes the critical reading of sources like legal documents and trial transcripts to obtain glimpses of life inside early modern regiments.

But these unknown individuals also lived within massive social and economic developments: global movements of people, money, and goods; demographic changes; and changes in the organization of fiscal-military systems. Staiano-Daniels seeks to study these systems through methods that take larger, statistical views of human life. Studying human life at both the micro and the macro scales reveals the many ways that the early modern period is the "hinge" of history, in which the world we live in took shape. The War People, his first book, situates a single regiment from mustering-in to collapse within its larger demographic and economic contexts.

Staiano-Daniels has a BA in the Great Books and an MA in Eastern classics from St John's College, and an MA from New York University in interdisciplinary studies and social thought. He earned his PhD in history from UCLA under David Sabean. His methods include social history, microhistory, economic history, intellectual history, and the Annales School.