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Books > Humanities > History > European history > 1750 to 1900
Russia played a fundamental role in the outcome of Napoleonic Wars;
the wars also had an impact on almost every area of Russian life.
Russia and the Napoleonic Wars brings together significant and new
research from Russian and non-Russian historians and their work
demonstrates the importance of this period both for Russia and for
all of Europe.
From the untimely demise of the 52-year-old Peter the Great in 1725
to nearly the end of that century, the fate of the Russian empire
would rest largely in the hands of five tsarinas. This book tells
their stories. Peter's widow Catherine I (1725-27), an orphan and
former laundress, would gain control of the ancestral throne, a
victorious army, and formidable navy in a country that stretched
from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Next, Anna Ioannovna
(1730-40), chosen by conniving ministers who sought an ineffectual
puppet, would instead tear up the document that would have changed
the course of Russian history forever only to rule Russia as her
private fiefdom and hunting estate. The ill-fated Anna Leopoldovna
(1740-41), groomed for the throne by her namesake aunt, would be
Regent for her young son only briefly before a coup by her aunt
Elizabeth would condemn Anna's family to a life of imprisonment,
desolation, and death in obscurity. The beautiful and shrewd
Elizabeth (1741-61) would seize her father Peter's throne, but,
obsessed with her own fading beauty, she would squander resources
in a relentless effort to stay young and keep her rivals at bay.
Finally, Catherine the Great (1762-96) would overthrow (and later
order the murder of) her own husband and rightful heir. Astute and
intelligent, Catherine had a talent for making people like her,
winning them to her cause; however, the era of her rule would be a
time of tumultuous change for both Europe and her beloved Russia.
In this vivid, quick-paced account, Anisimov goes beyond simply
laying out the facts of each empress's reign, to draw realistic
psychological portraits and to consider the larger fate of women in
politics.Together, these five portraits represent a history of
18th-century court life and international affairs. Anisimov's tone
is commanding, authoritative, but also convivial--inviting the
reader to share the captivating secrets that his efforts have
uncovered.
For a full month in the autumn of 1812 the 2,000-strong garrison of
the fortress the French had constructed to overawe the city of
Burgos defied the Duke of Wellington. In this work a leading
historian of the Peninsular teams up with a leading conflict
archaeologist to examine the reasons for Wellington's failure.
In Naples and Napoleon John Davis takes the southern Italian
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies as the vantage point for a sweeping
reconsideration of Italy's history in the age of Napoleon and the
European revolutions. The book's central themes are posed by the
period of French rule from 1806 to 1815, when southern Italy was
the Mediterranean frontier of Napoleon's continental empire. The
tensions between Naples and Paris made this an important chapter in
the history of that empire and revealed the deeper contradictions
on which it was founded. But the brief interlude of Napoleonic rule
later came to be seen as the critical moment when a modernizing
North finally parted company from a backward South. Although these
arguments still shape the ways in which Italian history is written,
in most parts of the North political and economic change before
Unification was slow and gradual; whereas in the South it came
sooner and in more disruptive forms. Davis develops a wide-ranging
critical reassessment of the dynamics of political change in the
century before Unification. His starting point is the crisis that
overwhelmed the Italian states at the end of the 18th century, when
Italian rulers saw the political and economic fabric of the Ancien
Regime undermined throughout Europe. In the South the crisis was
especially far reaching and this, Davis argues, was the reason why
in the following decade the South became the theatre for one of the
most ambitious reform projects in Napoleonic Europe. The transition
was precarious and insecure, but also mobilized political projects
and forms of collective action that had no counterparts elsewhere
in Italy before 1848, illustrating the similar nature of the
political challenges facing all the pre-Unification states.
Although Unification finally brought Italy's insecure dynastic
principalities to an end, it offered no remedies to the
insecurities that from much earlier had made the South especially
vulnerable to the challenges of the new age: which was why the
South would become a problem - Italy's 'Southern Problem'.
Combining military and cultural history this book offers a new
perspective on the British soldier in the Peninsular War. For all
the histories of the Peninsular War and its continuing romantic
appeal in the British imagination, little attention has been paid
to how young British officers and enlisted men wrote about and
experienced the places and peoples of Spain and Portugal during the
war against Napoleon. This book examines those travels and
cross-cultural encounters between 1808 and 1814, revealing Spain
and Portugal as seen through the eyes of British redcoats. It is
the story of how British soldiers interacted with the local
environment and culture, of their attitudes and behaviour towards
the inhabitants, and of how they wrote about all this to their
readers, both during and after the war, in letters and memoirs.
This new study of Napoleon emphasizes his ties to the French
Revolution, his embodiment of its militancy, and his rescue of its
legacies. Jordan's work illuminates all aspects of his fabulous
career, his views of the Revolution and history, the artists who
created and embellished his image, and much of his talk about
himself and his achievements.
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