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Books > History > European history > 1750 to 1900
The Crimean War (1853-1856) was the first modern war. A vicious
struggle between imperial Russia and an alliance of the British,
French and Ottoman Empires, it was the first conflict to be
reported first-hand in newspapers, painted by official war artists,
recorded by telegraph and photographed by camera. In her new short
history, Trudi Tate discusses the ways in which this novel
representation itself became part of the modern war machine. She
tells forgotten stories about the war experience of individual
soldiers and civilians, including journalists, nurses, doctors, war
tourists and other witnesses. At the same time, the war was a
retrograde one, fought with the mentality, and some of the
equipment, of Napoleonic times. Tate argues that the Crimean War
was both modern and old-fashioned, looking backwards and forwards,
and generating optimism and despair among those who lived through
it. She explores this paradox while giving full coverage to the
bloody battles (Alma, Balaklava, Inkerman), the siege of
Sebastopol, the much-derided strategies of the commanders,
conditions in the field and the cultural impact of the anti-Russian
alliance.
This is the first comprehensive history of the campaign that
determined control of Germany following Napoleon's catastrophic
defeat in Russia. Michael V. Leggiere reveals how, in the spring of
1813, Prussia, the weakest of the great powers, led the struggle
against Napoleon as a war of national liberation. Using German,
French, British, Russian, Austrian and Swedish sources, he provides
a panoramic history that covers the full sweep of the battle for
Germany from the mobilization of the belligerents, strategy, and
operations to coalition warfare, diplomacy, and civil-military
relations. He shows how Russian war weariness conflicted with
Prussian impetuosity, resulting in the crisis that almost ended the
Sixth Coalition in early June. In a single campaign, Napoleon drove
the Russo-Prussian army from the banks of the Saale to the banks of
the Oder. The Russo-Prussian alliance was perilously close to
imploding, only to be saved at the eleventh-hour by an armistice.
Placing the creation of Westphalia within the context of the larger
German story of the Napoleonic Wars, this groundbreaking book
offers the only complete history of Napoleon's grand experiment to
construct a model state in Germany. In 1807, in the wake of two
years of victories over the Austrians, Prussians, and Russians,
Napoleon redrew the map of central Europe by fashioning a new
German state. Dubbing it the Kingdom of Westphalia, he appointed
his 23-year-old brother Jerome as its king. Sam A. Mustafa shows
how Westphalia became a proving ground for the allegedly liberating
and modern concepts of the French Revolution, brought by foreign
conquest and enforced by a powerful new centralized state. Over the
next six years, the inhabitants of this region experienced
fundamental and often jarring changes in almost every aspect of
their lives. They witnessed a profound clash of French and German
culture, as well as new ideas about law, nationality, and politics.
And yet, for all of its promise on paper, Westphalia ended up
despised by most of its people, who cheered at its collapse and in
many cases helped to bring it down. What went wrong with this early
example of what we would today call "nation building" and how did
Germans react to the changes? Napoleon's Paper Kingdom is the first
book in the English language to provide a comprehensive
investigation of this fascinating chapter of the Napoleonic Wars.
The eighteenth century brought a period of tumultuous change to the
Ottoman Empire. While the Empire sought modernization through
military and administrative reform, it also lost much of its
influence on the European stage through war and revolt. In this
book, Ethan L. Menchinger sheds light on intellectual life,
politics, and reform in the Empire through the study of one of its
leading intellectuals and statesmen, Ahmed Vasif. Vasif's life
reveals new aspects of Ottoman letters - heated debates over moral
renewal, war and peace, justice, and free will - but it also forces
the reappraisal of Ottoman political reform, showing a vital
response that was deeply enmeshed in Islamic philosophy, ethics,
and statecraft. Tracing Vasif's role through the turn of the
nineteenth century, this book opens the debate on modernity and
intellectualism for those students and researchers studying the
Ottoman Empire, intellectual history, the Enlightenment, and
Napoleonic Europe.
In June 1802, the Haitian revolutionary hero Toussaint Louverture
was captured by special order of Napoleon Bonaparte and deported to
mainland France, where he spent the remainder of his life in
captivity in the prison of Fort de Joux. But Louverture, who had
managed to rise from humble slave to governor of the richest of
France's colonies, went down fighting. To defend his name and
secure his release, he wrote a vivid account of his career.
Historian Philippe Girard presents an annotated, scholarly,
multilingual edition of the memoir, based on an original copy in
Louverture's hand. Girard's introductory essay, based on archival
research in France and the Caribbean, retraces Louverture's career
in Haiti and provides a detailed narrative of the last year of
Louverture's life. Girard analyzes the significance of the memoirs
from a historical, literary, and linguistic perspective.
Louverture's writing provides a vivid alternative perspective to
anonymous plantation records, quantitative analyses of slave
trading ventures, and slave narratives mediated by white authors.
Though Louverture kept a stoic facade and rarely expressed his
innermost thoughts and fears in writing, his memoirs are unusually
emotional. He questioned whether he was targeted because of the
color of his skin, bringing racism, an issue that Louverture rarely
addressed head on with his white interlocutors, to the fore. The
full transcript of these memoirs in both Louverture's idiosyncratic
French and English helps paint a powerful yet nuanced portrait of
the Haitian Revolution's most famous son as a gifted leader, a
passionate advocate of slave emancipation, a loving family man, a
compromising politician, a tragic hero, and an evocative author and
user of Kreyol, Haiti's national language.
Threads of Empire examines how Russia's imperial officials and
intellectual elites made and maintained their authority among the
changing intellectual and political currents in Eurasia from the
mid-16th century to the revolution of 1917. The book focuses on a
region 750 miles east of Moscow known as Bashkiria. The region was
split nearly evenly between Russian and Turkic language speakers,
both nomads and farmers. Ufa province at Bashkiria's core had the
largest Muslim population of any province in the empire. The
empire's leading Muslim official, the mufti, was based there, but
the region also hosted a Russian Orthodox bishop. Bashkirs and
peasants had different legal status, and powerful Russian Orthodox
and Muslim nobles dominated the peasant estate. By the 20th
century, industrial mining and rail commerce gave rise to a class
structure of workers and managers. Bashkiria thus presents a
fascinating case study of empire in all its complexities and of how
the tsarist empire's ideology and categories of rule changed over
time.
This volume follows Metternich's career up to the restoration of
the Bourbons in France. Originally published in 1963. The Princeton
Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again
make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished
backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the
original texts of these important books while presenting them in
durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton
Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly
heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton
University Press since its founding in 1905.
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