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Books > Humanities > History > European history > 1750 to 1900
1903. Together with the journal kept by Gourgaud on their journey from Waterloo to St. Helena. Contents of The Talks of Napoleon: Early Years; Napoleon's Rise to Fame and Fortune; Campaign of Marengo; Government of France Under the Consulate and the Empire; Bonaparte Consul; Napoleon Emperor; Campaigns of 1809 in Spain and Austria; Domestic Relations; Campaigns of 1812-1814 in Russia, Germany and France; Elba and the Return from Elba; Waterloo; France after the Restoration; Great Generals in the Past; Marshals and Generals, 1814-15; The Art of War; Anecdotes and Miscellaneous Sayings; and Religion.
The time for autobiographies has arrived. Interest in authentic life stories seems greater than ever, even greater than well written works of fiction, because readers begin to recognise that nothing is more fantastic than the complicated reality through which we are forced to make our way. Accounts of everyday life have long since become a source of historic insight, and even historians are beginning to admit that concrete vignettes of an autobiographer's life are often better able to portray what the past was really like. All of this holds true for the memoirs of Jakob Ludwig Heller, who lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the 19th and 20th centuries. The records that he left behind reveal that nostalgic individuals were not far wrong in viewing the Empire, and its era as the quintessence of an intact world. Of course, things were not as peaceful and happy for everyone in the Danube monarchy, but compared with today's world, Jakob Ludwig Heller's milieu was a true idyll, where marriages endured, family ties were strong, hard work was rewarded, and people rejoiced over simple social gatherings.;Upbringing was strict, but caring, the children were well behaved, and earning a living was fun. Long live progress! The feeling that what he describes is lost forever is magnified further by the fact that he grew up in a Jewish, Central European milieu, where Jews perhaps did not live without tensions among neighbours of other faiths, but did live without being persecuted, robbed, and murdered. Not only Jewish readers will regret the loss of that normal way of life. Near the end of his memoirs, in retrospect the diarist complains about the inexplicable intrusions of lax morals, the disappearance of fixed norms, and the lack of the earlier, ever-present feeling of security and continuity. What would he say today? But what makes the reading of this simple story so rewarding, apart from the historic information, is the intelligent, humorous, warm-hearted man who is encountered on every page. His comments about the First World War are especially touching. Despite his extensive life experience, they betray his naive belief in Germany and Austria, in the government and the army.;He is convinced that the Central Powers fight for a just cause at a time when Karl Kraus is writing "The Last Days of Mankind". But in those days, the great satirist was still quite alone with his opinion. Most of the Jews, even most of the people, probably felt as did Jakob Ludwig Heller. And the waning of those certainties is the greatest tragedy of all, a sign of the insurmountable distance between our world and that of the past.
In this book, Heuer examines the meaning of citizenship during and after the revolution and the relationship between citizenship and gender as these ideas and practices were reworked in the late 1790s and early 19th century.
The mature nationalism that fueled the French Revolution grew from patriotic sensibilities fostered over the course of a century or more. Jay M. Smith proposes that the French thought their way to nationhood through a process of psychic adjustment premised on the reimagining of nobility, a social category and moral concept that had long dominated the cultural horizons of the old regime. Nobility Reimagined follows the elaboration of French patriotism across the eighteenth century and highlights the accentuation of key, and conflicting, features of patriotic thought at defining moments in the history of the monarchy. By enabling the articulation of different futures for nobility and nation, the patriotic awakening that marked the old regime helped to create both the quest for patriotic unity and the fierce constitutional battles that flowered at the time of the Revolution. Smith argues that the attempt to redefine and restore French nobility brought forth competing visions of patriotism with correlating models of the social and political order. Although the terms of public debate have changed, the same basic challenge continues to animate contemporary politics: how to reconcile inspiring and unifying nationalist ideals honor, virtue, patriotism with persistent social frictions rooted in class, ideology, ethnicity, or gender."
In his rich and learned new book about the naturalization of foreigners, Peter Sahlins offers an unusual and unexpected contribution to the histories of immigration, nationality, and citizenship in France and Europe. Through a study of foreign citizens, Sahlins discovers and documents a premodern world of legal citizenship, its juridical and administrative fictions, and its social practices. Telling the story of naturalization from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Unnaturally French offers an original interpretation of the continuities and ruptures of absolutist and modern citizenship, in the process challenging the historiographical centrality of the French Revolution.Unnaturally French is a brilliant synthesis of social, legal, and political history. At its core are the tens of thousands of foreign citizens whose exhaustively researched social identities and geographic origins are presented here for the first time. Sahlins makes a signal contribution to the legal history of nationality in his comprehensive account of the theory, procedure, and practice of naturalization. In his political history of the making and unmaking of the French absolute monarchy, Sahlins considers the shifting policies toward immigrants, foreign citizens, and state membership.Sahlins argues that the absolute citizen, exemplified in Louis XIV's attempt to tax all foreigners in 1697, gave way to new practices in the middle of the eighteenth century. This "citizenship revolution," long before 1789, produced changes in private and in political culture that led to the abolition of the distinction between foreigners and citizens. Sahlins shows how the Enlightenment and the political failure of the monarchy in France laid the foundations for the development of an exclusively political citizen, in opposition to the absolute citizen who had been above all a legal subject. The author completes his original book with a study of naturalization under Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration. Tracing the twisted history of the foreign citizen from the Old Regime to the New, Sahlins sheds light on the continuities and ruptures of the revolutionary process, and also its consequences.
Napoleon's military successes were due to a large degree to the efficiency of his command and control systems or 'headquarters'. These comprised the Great Imperial Headquarters and the Small Imperial Headquarters, both staffed by members of the Military Household and the Civil Household including officers and men of many different departments. This book shows how their functions slotted together into a system that provided the Emperor with all the information he needed to make decisions; with the means to turn those decisions into specific orders, and to distribute them quickly; and with all the protection, logistic and other back-up services that allowed his court to function while on campaign.
For centuries the histories of France and Germany have been linked in ways productive and destructive, and each nation's sense of itself has often been shaped by admiration of or hostility toward the other. Harold Mah explores the interweaving paths of German and French cultural identity that emerged in the Enlightenment and continued through the 19th century and into the 20th. formulate stable cultural identities constantly collapsed in the face of other powerful images and the rush of history. In Mah's view, these shifting conceptions of cultural identity are problematic phantasies, internally unstable and prone to falling apart under the pressure of events, only to be replaced by new, equally problematic constructions. Mah offers fresh analyses of a wide range of iconic texts and artworks, including those of Jacques-Louis David, de Stael, Diderot and Rousseau in France and Goethe, Hegel, Herder, Mann, Marx and Nietzsche in Germany. in issues of language, gender, classical revival, politics and modernity. Enlightenment Phantasies presents the shaping of cultural identity in narratives accessible not only to specialists but also to students and all readers concerned with the history of Western culture.
Nineteenth-century France grew fascinated with the local past. Thousands of citizens embraced local archaeology, penned historical vignettes and monographs, staged historical pageants, and created museums and pantheons of celebrities. Stephane Gerson's rich, elegantly written, and timely book provides the first cultural and political history of what contemporaries called the "cult of local memories," an unprecedented effort to resuscitate the past, instill affection for one's locality, and hence create a sense of place. A wide range of archival and printed sources (some of them untapped until now) inform the author's engaging portrait of a little-known realm of Parisian entrepreneurs and middling provincials, of obscure historians and intellectual luminaries. Arguing that the "local" and modernity were interlaced, rather than inimical, between the 1820s and 1890s, Gerson explores the diverse uses of local memories in modern France from their theatricality and commercialization to their political and pedagogical applications. The Pride of Place shows that, contrary to our received ideas about French nationhood and centralism, the "local" buttressed the nation while seducing Parisian and local officials. The state cautiously supported the cult of local memories even as it sought to co-opt them and grappled with their cultural and political implications. The current enthusiasm for local memories, Gerson thus finds, is neither new nor a threat to Republican unity. More broadly yet, this book illuminates the predicament of countries that, like France, are now caught between supranational forces and a revival of local sentiments."
Herbert Gladstone (1854-1930) was the only one of the sons of the renowned nineteenth-century Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone to enjoy a significant political career in his own right. Yet he has been generally relegated to the wings of history's stage, destined, it seems, to remain permanently in the shadow of his illustrious parent. Such an outcome would not have troubled him unduly, for his whole life was shaped by deep affection and respect for his father while as a political actor he was happiest operating in the political shadows rather than in the limelight - serving for 30 years as a Liberal MP for Leeds with short periods as Home Secretary (1905-1910) and, as Viscount Gladstone, Governor-General of South Africa (1910-1914). In exploring the intimate connection between Herbert Gladstone's public and private lives this new biography, the first for eighty years, reveals an unambitious, self-effacing man of faith and throws new light not only on his own career but also on significant episodes in British Victorian and early-twentieth century history.
From the start of the French Revolution, contemporary observers were struck by the overwhelming theatricality of political events. Examples of convergence between theater and politics included the election of dramatic actors to powerful political and military positions and reports that deputies to the National Assembly were taking acting lessons and planting paid "claqueurs" in the audience to applaud their employers on demand. Meanwhile, in a mock national assembly that gathered underneath an enormous circus tent in the center of Paris, spectators paid for the privilege of acting the role of political representatives for a day. Paul Friedland argues that politics and theater became virtually indistinguishable during the Revolutionary period because of a parallel evolution in the theories of theatrical and political representation. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, actors on political and theatrical stages saw their task as embodying a fictional entity -- in one case a character in a play, in the other, the corpus mysticum of the French nation. Friedland details the significant ways in which after 1750 the work of both was redefined. Dramatic actors were coached to portray their parts abstractly, in a manner that seemed realistic to the audience. With the creation of the National Assembly, abstract representation also triumphed in the political arena. In a break from the past, this legislature did not claim to be the nation, but rather to speak on its behalf. According to Friedland, this new form of representation brought about a sharp demarcation between actors -- on both stages -- and their audience, one that relegated spectators to the role of passive observers of aperformance that was given for their benefit but without their direct participation. Political Actors, a landmark contribution to eighteenth-century studies, furthers understanding not only of the French Revolution but also of the very nature of modern representative democracy.
How do peasants come to think of themselves as members of a nation? The widely accepted argument is that national sentiment originates among intellectuals or urban middle classes, then "trickles down" to the working class and peasants. Keely Stauter-Halsted argues that such models overlook the independent contribution of peasant societies. She explores the complex case of the Polish peasants of Austrian Galicia, from the 1848 emancipation of the serfs to the eve of the First World War. In the years immediately after emancipation, Polish-speaking peasants were more apt to identify with the Austrian Emperor and the Catholic Church than with their Polish lords or the middle classes of the Galician capital, Cracow. Yet by the end of the century, Polish-speaking peasants would cheer, "Long live Poland" and celebrate the centennial of the peasant-fueled insurrection in defense of Polish independence. The explanation for this shift, Stauter-Halsted says, is the symbiosis that developed between peasant elites and upper-class reformers. She reconstructs this difficult, halting process, paying particular attention to public life and conflicts within the rural communities themselves. The author's approach is at once comparative and interdisciplinary, drawing from literature on national identity formation in Latin America, China, and Western Europe. The Nation in the Village combines anthropology, sociology, and literary criticism with economic, social, cultural, and political history.
Popular images of women were everywhere in revolutionary France. Although women's political participation was curtailed, female allegories of liberty, justice, and the republic played a crucial role in the passage from old regime to modern society. In her lavishly illustrated and gracefully written book, Joan B. Landes explores this paradox within the workings of revolutionary visual culture and traces the interaction between pictorial and textual political arguments. Landes highlights the widespread circulation of images of the female body, notwithstanding the political leadership's suspicions of the dangers of feminine influence and the seductions of visual imagery. The use of caricatures and allegories contributed to the destruction of the masculinized images of hierarchic absolutism and to forging new roles for men and women in both the intimate and public arenas. Landes tells the fascinating story of how the depiction of the nation as a desirable female body worked to eroticize patriotism and to bind male subjects to the nation-state. Despite their political subordination, women too were invited to identify with the project of nationalism. Recent views of the French Revolution have emphasized linguistic concerns; in contrast, Landes stresses the role of visual cognition in fashioning ideas of nationalism and citizenship. Her book demonstrates as well that the image is often a site of contestation, as individual viewers may respond to it in unexpected, even subversive, ways.
Robert Geraci presents an exceptionally original account of both the politics and the lived experience of diversity in a society whose ethnic complexity has long been downplayed. For centuries, Russians have defined their country as both a multinational empire and a homogeneous nation-state in the making, and have alternately embraced and repudiated the East or Asia as fundamental to Russia's identity. The author argues that the city of Kazan, in the middle Volga region, was the chief nineteenth-century site for mediating this troubled and paradoxical relationship with the East, much as St. Petersburg had served as Russia's window on Europe a century earlier. He shows how Russians sought through science, religion, pedagogy, and politics to understand and promote the Russification of ethnic minorities in the East, as well as to define themselves. Vivid in narrative detail, meticulously argued, and peopled by a colorful cast including missionaries, bishops, peasants, mullahs, professors, teachers, students, linguists, orientalists, archeologists, and state officials, Window on the East uses previously untapped archival and published materials to describe the creation (sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional) of intermediate and new forms of Russianness.
In August 1836, Alexander Pushkin wrote a poem now popularly known simply as "Monument." In the decades following his death in January 1837, the poem "Monument" was transformed into a statue in central Moscow: the Pushkin Monument. At its dedication in 1880, the interaction between the verbal text and the visual monument established a creative dynamic that subsequent generations of artists and thinkers amplified through the use of allusion, simultaneously inviting their readers and spectators into a shared cultural history and enriching the meaning of their original creations. The history of the Pushkin Monument reveals how allusive practice becomes more complex over time. As the population of literate Russians grew throughout the twentieth century, both writers and readers negotiated increasingly complex allusions not only to Pushkin's poem, but to its statuesque form in Moscow and the many performances that took place around it. Because of this, the story of Pushkin's Monument is also the story of cultural memory and the aesthetic problems that accompany a cultural history that grows ever longer as it moves into the future.
Russians have often been characterized as people with souls rather than selves. Self and Story in Russian History challenges the portrayal of the Russian character as selfless, self-effacing, or self-torturing by exploring the texts through which Russians have defined themselves as private persons and shaped their relation to the cultural community. The stories of self under consideration here reflect the perspectives of men and women from the last two hundred years, ranging from westernized nobles to simple peasants, from such famous people as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Akhmatova, and Nicholas II to lowly religious sectarians. Fifteen distinguished historians and literary scholars situate the narratives of self in their historical context and show how, since the eighteenth century, Russians have used expressive genres -- including diaries, novels, medical case studies, films, letters, and theater -- to make political and moral statements. The first book to examine the narration of self as idea and ideal in Russia, this vital work contemplates the shifting historical manifestations of identity, the strategies of self-creation, and the diversity of narrative forms. Its authors establish that there is a history of the individual in Russian culture roughly analogous to the one associated with the West.
Any miniature wargame is greatly enhanced by realistic and evocative scenery and buildings, but commercial ready-made pieces can be expensive. Building your own can be a cost-effective and very rewarding alternative, another hobby in itself, but it can be hard to know where to start. Wargames Terrain and Buildings is a series of books aimed at giving wargamers the skills, techniques and guidance they need to create their own stunning and practical model buildings. In this volume, master modeller Tony Hardwood shares his years of experience and presents the reader with a wide range of projects for the Napoleonic era. With the aid of step-by-step photographs, he guides the reader through building and finishing each of these models, which are organized in three sections of increasing complexity and encompass a range of scales and different materials. Nine projects are included but the techniques and skills demonstrated along the way, along with valuable advice on tools, construction materials and paints, can be adapted and applied to a much wider range of structures to grace your battlefields.
'A superb little book that is micro-history at its best' Washington Post 'The brevity of this remarkable book belies the amount of work that went into it. One can only marvel at how well Professor Simms has gone through the original sources - the surviving journals, reminiscences and letters of the individual combatants - to produce a coherent and gripping narrative' Nick Lezard, Guardian The true story, told minute by minute, of the soldiers who defeated Napoleon - from Brendan Simms, acclaimed author of Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy Europe had been at war for over twenty years. After a short respite in exile, Napoleon had returned to France and threatened another generation of fighting across the devastated and exhausted continent. At the small Belgian village of Waterloo two large, hastily mobilized armies faced each other to decide the future of Europe. Unknown either to Napoleon or Wellington the battle would be decided by a small, ordinary group of British and German troops given the task of defending the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte. This book tells their extraordinary story, brilliantly recapturing the fear, chaos and chanciness of battle and using previously untapped eye-witness reports. Through determination, cunning and fighting spirit, some four hundred soldiers held off many thousands of French and changed the course of history.
One of the great writers of the nineteenth century, Nikolai Gogol was born and raised in Ukraine before he was lionized and canonized in Russia. The ambiguities within his subversive, ironic works are matched by those that surround the debate over his national identity. This book presents a completely new assessment of the problem: rather than adopting the predominant "either/or" perspective - wherein Gogol is seen as either Ukrainian or Russian - it shows how his cultural identity was a product of negotiation with imperial and national cultural codes and values. By examining Gogol's ambivalent self-fashioning, language performance, and textual practices, this book shows how Gogol played with both imperial and local sources of identity and turned his hybridity into a project of subtle cultural resistance. Ilchuk provides a comprehensive account of assimilation and hybridization of Ukrainians in the Russian empire, arguing that Russia's imperial culture has depended on Ukraine and the participation of Ukrainian intellectuals in its development. Ilchuk also introduces innovative computer-assisted methods of textual analysis to demonstrate the palimpsest-like quality of Gogol's texts and national identity.
This authoritative, comprehensive, and enthralling book describes and analyzes Napoleon's most powerful weapon,the Grande Armee which at its peak numbered over a million soldiers. Elting examines every facet of this incredibly complex human machine: its organization, command system, logistics, weapons, tactics, discipline, recreation, mobile hospitals, camp followers, and more. From the army's formation out of the turmoil of Revolutionary France through its swift conquests of vast territories across Europe to its legendary death at Waterloo, this book uses excerpts from soldiers' letters, eyewitness accounts, and numerous firsthand details to place the reader in the boots of Napoleon's conscripts and generals. In Elting's masterful hands the experience is truly unforgettable.
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Portrays the cultural bohemia of turn-of-the-century Paris who carried the arts into a period of renewal and accomplishment, who laid the ground-work for Dadaism and Surrealism.
Napoleon's attack on Egypt in 1798 was the first on a Middle Eastern country by a Western power in modern times. With 335 ships and 40,000 men, it was the largest long-distance seaborne force the world had ever seen. Napoleon's assault was intended to be much more than a colonial adventure, however, for he took with him over one hundred and fifty scientists, mathematicians, artists and writers - a 'Legion of Culture' - with a view to bringing Western civilization to 'backward' Egypt. Ironically, what these intellectuals discovered in Egypt would transform our knowledge of Western civilization and form the basis of Egyptology. But there were also setbacks. Nelson's destruction of the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile apparently put an end to Napoleon's secret plans to follow in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and invade India. Napoleon was just twenty-eight when he invaded Egypt and it was an episode which contained in embryo many seminal events of his later career and set the standard for his brilliant, ambitious and ultimately disastrous career. |
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