In the early 1930s, approximately 6,500 Finns from Canada and the United States moved to Soviet Karelia, on the border of Finland, to build a Finnish workers' society. They were recruited by the Soviet leadership for their North American mechanical and lumber expertise, their familiarity with the socialist cause, and their Finnish language and ethnicity. By 1936, however, Finnish culture and language came under attack and ethnic Finns became the region's primary targets in the Stalinist Great Terror. Building That Bright Future relies on the personal letters and memoirs of these Finnish migrants to build a history of everyday life during a transitional period for both North American socialism and Soviet policy. Highlighting the voices of men, women, and children, the book follows the migrants from North America to the Soviet Union, providing vivid descriptions of daily life. Samira Saramo brings readers into personal contact with Finnish North Americans and their complex and intimate negotiations of self and belonging. Through letters and memoirs, Building That Bright Future explores the multiple strategies these migrants used to make sense of their rapidly shifting positions in the Soviet hierarchy and the relationships that rooted them to multiple places and times.

In January 1829, an angry mob in Tehran murdered Russian poet and diplomat Alexander Griboedov, author of the verse comedy Woe from Wit and architect of the Russian annexation of the north Caucasus from Persia after the Russo-Persian War. A century later, the Russian formalist writer Yury Tynianov wrote a historical novel about the event entitled The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar. In this wide-ranging study, Anna Aydinyan posits that The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar conceptualizes Orientalism fifty years before Edward Said coined the term. She argues that Tynianov parodied historical works on the Caucasus in his novel in order to critique the ways in which exoticizing the East enabled imperialism and colonization. Analysing literary and non-literary texts on Russia's relationship with Iran, along with the economic and cultural development of Transcaucasia after the Russo-Persian War, Formalists against Imperialism studies Russian culture within the framework of comparative colonialisms and examines the twentieth-century Russian reconsideration of the country's imperial past.

In the 1700s, Kazan Tatar (Muslim scholars of Kazan) and scholarly networks stood at the forefront of Russia's expansion into the South Urals, western Siberia, and the Kazakh steppe. It was there that the Tatars worked with Russian agents, established settlements, and spread their own religious and intellectual cuture that helped shaped their identity in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Kazan Tatars profited economically from Russia's commercial and military expansion to Muslim lands and began to present themselves as leaders capable of bringing Islamic modernity to the rest of Russia's Muslim population. Danielle Ross bridges the history of Russia's imperial project with the history of Russia's Muslims by exploring the Kazan Tatars as participants in the construction of the Russian empire. Ross focuses on Muslim clerical and commercial networks to reconstruct the ongoing interaction among Russian imperial policy, nonstate actors, and intellectual developments within Kazan's Muslim community and also considers the evolving relationship with Central Asia, the Kazakh steppe, and western China. Tatar Empire offers a more Muslim-centered narrative of Russian empire building, making clear the links between cultural reformism and Kazan Tatar participation in the Russian eastward expansion.

Volume I of The Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars covers the international foreign political dimensions of the wars and the social, legal, political and economic structures of the Empire. Leading historians from around the world come together to discuss the different aspects of the origins of the Napoleonic Wars, their international political implications and the concrete ways the Empire was governed. This volume begins by looking at the political context that produced the Napoleonic Wars and setting it within the broader context of eighteenth century great power politics in the Age of Revolution. It considers the administration and governance of the Empire, including with France's client states and the role of the Bonaparte family in the Empire. Further chapters in the volume examine the war aims of the various protagonists and offer an overall assessment of the nature of war in this period.

Napoleon: The End of Glory tells the story of the dramatic two years that led to Napoleon's abdication in April 1814. Though crucial to European history, they remain strangely neglected, lying between the two much better-known landmarks of the retreat from Moscow and the battle of Waterloo. Yet this short period saw both Napoleon's loss of his European empire, and of his control over France itself. In 1813 the massive battle of Leipzig - the bloodiest in modern history before the first day of the Somme - forced his armies back to the Rhine. The next year, after a brilliant campaign against overwhelming odds, Napoleon was forced to abdicate and exiled to Elba. He regained his throne the following year, for just a hundred days, in a doomed adventure whose defeat at Waterloo was predictable. The most fascinating - and least-known - aspect of these years is that at several key points Napoleon's enemies offered him peace terms that would have allowed him to keep his throne, if not his empire, a policy inspired by the brilliant and devious Austrian foreign minister Metternich. Napoleon: The End of Glory sheds fascinating new light on Napoleon, Metternich, and many other key figures and events in this dramatic period of European history, drawing on previously unused archives in France, Austria, and the Czech Republic. Through these it seeks to answer the most important question of all - why, instead of accepting a compromise, Napoleon chose to gamble on total victory at the risk of utter defeat?

This is the contemporary account of Jakob Walter, a Westphalian conscript in Napoleon's Grande Armee. Walter took part in the Emperor's campaigns against Prussia, Austria and finally, the disastrous Russian campaign of 1812. This is what it really meant to "march with the Emperor". This volume is illustrated throughout with the watercolours produced by Albrecht Adam, another German who served in the ranks of Napoleon's armies, who witnessed many of the same scenes as Jakob Walter. Together the text and illustrations provide a powerful primary insight in to the events of 1812 as witnessed by the men who were there. This book is part of the 'Military History From Primary Sources' series, a new military history range compiled and edited by Emmy Award winning author and historian Bob Carruthers. The series draws on primary sources and contemporary documents to provide a new insight into the true nature of warfare. The series consultant is David Mcwhinnie, creator of the award winning PBS series 'Battlefield'.

This book was written to provide an in-depth study of the Danish and Norwegian armies of the Napoleonic Wars. The goal was to provide a working document which is as accurate as possible, covering the uniforms of these armies, their weapons and their evolution as well as their colours and a look at their basic tactics. Although this is principally a uniform book, historical background is also provided to place the details in their context. Most of the information contained in this volume is published in the English language for the first time. This third volume looks in depth principally at the Norwegian Army including the regular infantry, cavalry, including their Colours, Guidons and Standards and field artillery covering all aspects of their organisation, uniforms, arms and equipment as well as their Jaegers, light infantry and ski troops. The specifically Norwegian cannon and limbers are also covered. Another subject covered by this volume is the numerous Norwegian and Danish volunteer and militias companies, some of whom were actively engaged on the field of battle. An in depth study of the Island of Bornholm is also included. This volume is illustrated with 54 original full colour plates. Unlike the few other works in English this book has been conducted with the assistance of respected Norwegian historians, as well as Danish and German historians.

'A Napoleonic triumph of a book, irresistibly galloping with the momentum of a cavalry charge' Simon Sebag Montefiore 'Simply dynamite' Bernard Cornwell From Andrew Roberts, author of the bestsellers The Storm of War and Churchill: Walking with Destiny, this is the definitive modern biography of Napoleon. Napoleon Bonaparte lived one of the most extraordinary of all human lives. In the space of just twenty years, from October 1795 when as a young artillery captain he cleared the streets of Paris of insurrectionists, to his final defeat at the (horribly mismanaged) battle of Waterloo in June 1815, Napoleon transformed France and Europe. After seizing power in a coup d'etat he ended the corruption and incompetence into which the Revolution had descended. In a series of dazzling battles he reinvented the art of warfare; in peace, he completely remade the laws of France, modernised her systems of education and administration, and presided over a flourishing of the beautiful 'Empire style' in the arts. The impossibility of defeating his most persistent enemy, Great Britain, led him to make draining and ultimately fatal expeditions into Spain and Russia, where half a million Frenchmen died and his Empire began to unravel. More than any other modern biographer, Andrew Roberts conveys Napoleon's tremendous energy, both physical and intellectual, and the attractiveness of his personality, even to his enemies. He has walked 53 of Napoleon's 60 battlefields, and has absorbed the gigantic new French edition of Napoleon's letters, which allows a complete re-evaluation of this exceptional man. He overturns many received opinions, including the myth of a great romance with Josephine: she took a lover immediately after their marriage, and, as Roberts shows, he had three times as many mistresses as he acknowledged. Of the climactic Battle of Leipzig in 1813, as the fighting closed around them, a French sergeant-major wrote, 'No-one who has not experienced it can have any idea of the enthusiasm that burst forth among the half-starved, exhausted soldiers when the Emperor was there in person. If all were demoralised and he appeared, his presence was like an electric shock. All shouted "Vive l'Empereur!" and everyone charged blindly into the fire.' The reader of this biography will understand why this was so.

In this book, leading historians of the French, Batavian, Helvetic, Cisalpine, and Neapolitan revolutions bridge the gap between the historiographies of the so-called Sister Republics and explore political culture as a set of discourses or political practices. Parliamentary practices, the comparability of "universal" political concepts, late-eighteenth-century Republicanism, the relationship between press and politics, and the interaction between the Sister Republics and France are all examined from a comparative, transnational perspective.

Volume III of the Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars moves away from the battlefield to explore broader questions of society and culture. Leading scholars from around the globe show how the conflict left its mark on virtually every aspect of society. They reflect on the experience of the soldiers who fought in them, examining such matters as military morale, ideas of honour and masculinity, the treatment of wounds and the fate of prisoners-of-war; and they explore social issues such as the role of civilians, women's experience, trans-border encounters and the roots of armed resistance. They also demonstrates how the experience of war was inextricably linked to empire and the wider world. Individual chapters discuss the depiction of the Wars in literature and the arts and their lasting impact on European culture. The volume concludes by examining the memory of the Wars and their legacy for the nineteenth-century world.

On the four sides of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, serried tablets display the names of 660 honoured commanders of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Most are those of generals and marshals of the French Army - but 26 are the names of admirals, commanders of the fleets of Republican and Napoleonic France. In Napoleon's Admirals, Richard Humble presents not only their individual stories, but an entirely new appraisal of the Anglo-French naval war of 1793-1814: the longest sea war in modern history, exploding many myths along the way. The aristocratic officers of the French Navy did not emigrate en masse when the Revolution came, leaving the Navy leaderless and doomed to repeated defeats at sea. Of the 26 'Admirals of the Arc,' 23 had learned their trade in the French royal and merchant navies of the Ancien Regime. Republican France could call on a wide range of seasoned combat veterans from the American Revolutionary War (1778-83), whose stories are a revelation in themselves. These former King's officers stayed, and loyally tried to serve their country as the Revolution pursued its wasteful and unpredictable course. Three of them paid for their loyalty under the guillotine. Contrary to popular British belief, the naval war did not end with Nelson's victory at Trafalgar in October 1805. Thanks to an energetic warship-building program, the French Navy recovered quickly from Trafalgar, and Napoleon's conquests created an ever-widening network of new French naval bases for the British Admiralty to cover. Collingwood, Nelson's deputy at Trafalgar, was still commanding in the Mediterranean four years later. The Admiralty had not dared to recall him and he died at sea, utterly exhausted, in March 1810. Four months later the French inflicted the greatest humiliation suffered by the Royal Navy in the entire naval war: the annihilation of an entire British frigate squadron in the battle of Grand-Port, Mauritius, in August 1810. In this account of the men who imposed such a strain on the world's greatest navy for 21 years, Richard Humble has provided a remarkable addition to the well-worn pages of conventional naval history.

Winfried Baumgart's masterful history of the Crimean War has been expanded and fully updated to reflect advances made in the field since the book's first publication. It convincingly argues that if the war had continued after 1856, the First World War would have taken place 60 years earlier, but that fighting ultimately ceased because diplomacy never lost its control over the use of war as an instrument in power politics. With 19 images, 13 maps and additional tables as well as a brand new chapters on 'the medical services', this expanded and fully-updated 2nd edition explores * The origins and diplomacy of the Crimean War * The war aims and general attitudes of the belligerent powers (Russia, France, and Britain), non-belligerent German powers (Austria and Prussia) and a selected number of neutral powers, including the United States * The characteristics and capabilities of the armies involved * The nature of the fighting itself The Crimean War: 1853-1856 examines the conflict in both its Europe-wide and global contexts, moving beyond the five great European powers to consider the role and importance of smaller states and theatres of war that have otherwise been under-served. To this end, it looks at fighting on the Danube front, the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Caucasian battlefield, as well as the White Sea and the Pacific, with final chapters devoted to the Paris peace congress of 1856, the end of the war and its legacy. This book remains the definitive study of one of the most important wars in modern history.

Patrick O'Brien provides the forward to this edition of the most successful Conway Maritime title. This book is the perfect guide to Nelson's Navy for all those with an interest in the workings of the great fleet. The book is eminently readable and is the first single-volume work to cover in such depth this vast and complex subject. Written by one of the world's leading authorities on the sailing navy the book contains considerable original research to give a clear and authentic picture of the Senior Service as a whole. With a foreword by one of the most successful maritime fiction authors of the current age, the book is also of interest to all those with enthusiasm for the literature based on the Nelsonic-era.

Intelligence was just as important in the Napoleonic Wars as it is today. Then there was only one way of obtaining it by spies and informers. The Author uses first hand accounts of three of Wellingtons most daring and successful Intelligence Officers. The three men, all of Scottish descent, were very different in character. One was killed in action and another taken prisoner and after narrowly avoiding summary execution made a dramatic escape. There is a romantic angle too. Their stories skilfully interwoven against the backdrop of the brutal Peninsula War where atrocities were common place. This book gives a fresh insight into Wellingtons remarkable triumph over Napoleons armies.

This study is an inquiry into the fortunes, in both theory and practice, of the idea of history painting during the Napoleonic period. Its main argument is that under Napoleon, French history painting, especially battle painting, encountered a series of questions as to its nature and function. These questions arose in part from the (often contradictory) demand of a propaganda-machine operating within a postrevolutionary crisis of political legitimation, but also from changes in artistic taste which both retained and re-directed an earlier notion of the civic responsibilities of the history painter. This is a resolutely interdisciplinary book: drawing on perspectives from political thought and history, military theory and practice and art history, which centres on the work of the painter, Antoine-Jean Gros, and his controversial painting, La Bataille d'Eylau. `Detailed and highly intelligent . . . this book is a significant addition to the literature on French art of the early nineteenth century.' Times Literary Supplement

Between two attempts in 1800 and 1804 to assassinate Napoleon Bonaparte, the British government launched a campaign of black propaganda of unprecedented scope and intensity to persuade George III's reluctant subjects to fight the Napoleonic War, a war to the death against one man: the Corsican usurper and tyrant. This Dark Business tells the story of the British government's determination to destroy Napoleon Bonaparte by any means possible. We have been taught to think of Napoleon as the aggressor - a man with an unquenchable thirst for war and glory - but what if this story masked the real truth: that the British refusal to make peace either with revolutionary France or with the man who claimed to personify the revolution was the reason this Great War continued for more than twenty years? At this pivotal moment when it consolidated its place as number one world power Britain was uncompromising. To secure the continuing rule of Church and King, the British invented an evil enemy, the perpetrator of any number of dark deeds; and having blackened Napoleon's name, with the help of networks of French royalist spies and hitmen, they also tried to assassinate him. This Dark Business plunges the reader into the hidden underworld of Georgian politics in which, faced with the terrifying prospect of revolution, bribery and coercion are the normal means to secure compliance, a ruthless world of spies, plots and lies.

Imperial Bayonets examines the maneuvering systems of the French, Prussians, Russians, Austrians and British from 1792 to 1815. It studies infantry maneuvers and firepower, cavalry maneuvers, and artillery. It is THE definitive work on Napoleonic tactics and a must read for anyone wanting to understand the fundamentals of period tactics. It provides not only a discussion of every major maneuver of the five major powers, i.e. from line to square, or column, but does time and motion studies of how long it would take to execute those maneuvers and compares them to the other nations. It covers infantry and cavalry maneuvers on this level. It performs an analysis of both musketry effectiveness and artillery effectiveness, providing curves that demonstrate the effectiveness of both. It also covers brigade maneuvers and army marches.

In July 1876 three eight-year-old girls from Marpingen, a village in the west German border region of Saarland, claimed to have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Their visions attracted tens of thousands of pilgrims and prompted numerous claims of miraculous cures. They also led to military intervention, the dispatching of an undercover detective, parliamentary debate, and a dramatic trial. This book examines an episode that contemporaries dubbed the 'German Lourdes', its background and its repercussions. David Blackbourn sets out to recreate the Catholic world of Bismarckian Germany through a detailed analysis of the changing social, economic, and community structures in which it was embedded, and a sensitive account of popular religious beliefs. He powerfully evokes the crisis-laden atmosphere of the 1870s, and offers a subtle interpretation of the interplay between politics and religion in newly unified Germany. The book ranges boldly across the fields of social, cultural and political history, in an engrossing story with many contemporary resonances.

In the bicentenary celebrations of the French Revolution Michelet was strangely neglected. This lecture examines the manner in which Michelet approached the Revolution and considers this part of the work of one who has often been thought of as the Revolution's greatest historian.

In the summer of 1812 Napoleon gathered his fearsome Grande Armee, more than half a million strong, on the banks of the Niemen River. He was about to undertake the most daring of all his many campaigns: the invasion of Russia. Meeting only sporadic opposition and defeating it easily along the way, the huge army moved forward, advancing ineluctably on Moscow through the long hot days of summer. On September 14, Napoleon entered the Russian capital, fully anticipating the Czar's surrender. Instead he encountered an eerily deserted city--and silence. The French army sacked the city, and by October, with Moscow in ruins and his supply lines overextended, and with the Russian winter upon him, Napoleon had no choice but to turn back. One of the greatest military debacles of all time had only just begun.
In this famous memoir, Philippe-Paul de Segur, a young aide-de-camp to Napoleon, tells the story of the unfolding disaster with the keen eye of a crack reporter and an astute grasp of human character. His book, a fundamental inspiration for Tolstoy's "War and Peace," is a masterpiece of military history that teaches an all-too-timely lesson about imperial hubris and its risks.

Military Men of Feeling considers the popularity of the figure of the gentle soldier in the Victorian period. It traces a persistent narrative swerve from tales of war violence to reparative accounts of soldiers as moral exemplars, homemakers, adopters of children on the battlefield, and nurses. This material invites us to think afresh about Victorian masculinity and Victorian militarism. It challenges ideas about the separation of military and domestic life, and about the incommunicability of war experience. Focusing on representations of soldiers' experiences of touch and emotion, the book combines the work of well known writers - including Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Yonge - with previously unstudied writing and craft produced by British soldiers in the Crimean War, 1854-56. The Crimean War was pivotal in shaping British attitudes to military masculinity. A range of media enabled unprecedented public engagement with the progress and infamous 'blunders' of the conflict. Soldiers and civilians reflected on appropriate behaviour across ranks, forms of heroism, the physical suffering of the troops, administrative management and the need for army reform. The book considers how the military man of feeling contributes to the rethinking of gender roles, class and military hierarchy in the mid-nineteenth century, and how this figure was used in campaigns for reform. The gentle soldier could also do more bellicose social and political work, disarming anti-war critiques and helping people to feel better about war. This book looks at the difficult mixed politics of this figure. It considers questions, debated in the nineteenth century and which remain urgent today, about the relationship between feeling and action, and the ethics of an emotional response to war. It makes a case for the importance of emotional and tactile military history, bringing the Victorian military man of feeling into contemporary debates about liberal warriors and soldiers as social workers.

Intelligence is often the critical factor in a successful military campaign. This was certainly the case for Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, in the Peninsular War. In this book, author Huw J. Davies offers the first full account of the scope, complexity, and importance of Wellington's intelligence department, describing a highly organized, multifaceted series of networks of agents and spies throughout Spain and Portugal - an organization that was at once a microcosm of British intelligence at the time and a sophisticated forebear to intelligence developments in the twentieth century. Spying for Wellington shows us an organization that was, in effect, two parallel networks: one made up of Foreign Office agents ""run"" by British ambassadors in Spain and Portugal, the other comprising military spies controlled by Wellington himself. The network of agents supplied strategic intelligence, giving the British army advance warning of the arrival, destinations, and likely intentions of French reinforcements. The military network supplied operational intelligence, which confirmed the accuracy of the strategic intelligence and provided greater detail on the strengths, arms, and morale of the French forces. Davies reveals how, by integrating these two forms of intelligence, Wellington was able to develop an extremely accurate and reliable estimate of French movements and intentions not only in his own theater of operations but also in other theaters across the Iberian Peninsula. The reliability and accuracy of this intelligence, as Davies demonstrates, was central to Wellington's decision-making and, ultimately, to his overall success against the French. Correcting past, incomplete accounts, this is the definitive book on Wellington's use of intelligence. As such, it contributes to a clearer, more comprehensive understanding of Wellington at war and of his place in the history of British military intelligence.

'I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.' Becky Sharp is sharp, calculating, and determined to succeed. Craving wealth and a position in society, she charms, hoodwinks, manipulates everyone she meets, rising in the world as she attaches herself to a succession of rich men. Becky's fortunes are contrasted with those of her best friend Amelia, who has none of Becky's wit and vitality but whose gentle-heartedness attracts the devotion of the loyal Dobbin. Set during the Napoleonic wars, Vanity Fair follows Becky as she cuts a swathe through Regency society. Thackeray paints a panoramic portrait of the age, with war, money and national identity his great subjects. The battle for social success is as fierce as the battle of Waterloo, and its casualties as stricken. The satire is at once biting and profound, sparing none in a clear-eyed exposure of a world on the make. Thackeray's scepticism of human motives borders on cynicism yet Vanity Fair is among the funniest novels of the Victorian age. This new edition includes all Thackeray's original illustrations. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Studies of British Romanticism have traditionally tended to envisage it as an intensely local, indeed insular, phenomenon. Yet, just as the seemingly isolated British Isles became more and more central in international geo-political and economic contexts between the 1780s and the 1830s, so too literature and culture were characterized by an increasingly close and relevant dialogue with foreign and especially Continental European traditions, both past and contemporary. Diego Saglia casts new light on the significantly transformative impact of this dialogue on Britain during the years that saw a return to unimpeded cross-border cultural traffic after the end of the Napoleonic emergency. Focusing on modes of translation and appropriation in a variety of literary and cultural forms, this book reconsiders the notion of the supposed intrinsic insularity of Britain through the lens of new key questions about the national, international and transnational features of Romantic-period literature and culture.

In a world of conflicting nationalist claims, mass displacements and asylum-seeking, a great many people are looking for 'home' or struggling to establish the 'nation'. These were also important preoccupations between the English and the French revolutions: a period when Britain was first at war within itself, then achieved a confident if precarious equilibrium, and finally seemed to have come once more to the edge of overthrow. In the century and a half between revolution experienced and revolution observed, the impulse to identify or implicitly appropriate home and nation was elemental to British literature. This wide-ranging study by international scholars provides an innovative and thorough account of writings that vigorously contested notions and images of the nation and of private domestic space within it, tracing the larger patterns of debate, while at the same time exploring how particular writers situated themselves within it and gave it shape.