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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > War & defence operations > General
"Journal of the Waterloo Campaign" remains one of the most famous personal accounts of the climactic three days which ended the military career and empire of Napoleon Bonaparte. Captain Cavalie Mercer (1783-1868), was a skilled writer who recorded the day's events each evening. As a result, readers can experience through Mercer's keen eye the turbulence and graphic immediacy of the entire campaign: the news of Napoleon's return from Elba; the landing of Wellington's forces in Belgium; the lulls and hard marching; the battle at Quatre Bras (where Mercer fired a few rounds at Napoleon himself); Wellington's retreat; the ferocious fighting at Waterloo; and Mercer's own bold contribution to the larger Allied victory.
Describes American public opinion toward wars and other large military operations over the last decade. The support of the American public is widely held to be a critical prerequisite for undertaking military action abroad. This monograph describes American public opinion toward wars and other large military operations over the last decade, to delineate the sources of support and opposition for each war or operation, to identify the principal fault lines in support, and to illuminate those factors that are consistent predictors of support for and opposition to military operations.
America's victory came as a surprise to many people. How did untrained American generals, essentially military amateurs at the outbreak of war, and their ragged, half-starved troops manage to defeat British professionals? To what extent did the quality of British military leadership affect the outcome? Was the American success due to the British commanders' incompetence and faulty strategy, or were timing and opportunity more responsible for Washington and his colleagues' achievement? This book provides superbly balanced portraits of the British and American leadership. Renowned historians have contributed concise, remarkably informative, and authoritative essays on generals of both sides. The military gallery includes such Americans as George Washington, Nathaniel Greene, Benedict Arnold, Marquis de Lafayette, and eight others. The British are well-represented by Thomas Gage, Sir William Howe, Charles Lord Cornwallis, and seven others.Each piece not only explores the subject's personality and exploits, but interprets his contribution to victory or defeat. In the process the scholarship never loses sight of the brave, touchy, brilliant, and flawed personalities who fought beside and against one another. Rarely, if ever, has one volume offered such stimulating commentary and insights into key commanders of the Revolutionary War.
Undoubtedly the most famous work of military history of the nineteenth century, Edward S. Creasy's "Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World" has been read and re-read for close to 150 years. It is not only the authoritative account of each battle that makes Creasy's work such a classic--it is his command of narrative, his interest in human struggle, his profound deductions as to effects of the battles, and his striving after truth. Furthermore, his selections seem as wise and well-considered today as when "Fifteen Decisive Battles" first appeared in 1851: Nobody since has made better ones, nor given us better accounts. Apart from the scholarship and literary skill of Creasy's book, there is another reason it has endured: Creasy was essentially fair-minded. He had been a judge, and when he became England's great military critic and historian, he maintained a thoroughly judicial attitude. He was not a British partisan, nor French, nor German--he was a cosmopolitan observer of great events.Out of 2300 years, Creasy only found fifteen battles which he called decisive in the highest sense. He chose them not for the number of killed and wounded, nor for their status in myth and lore, but because they fundamentally changed the course of world history. In doing so, he made his book a miniature military history of the western world, a classic that will repay continued study for generations to come, as it has for generations.
General George B. McClellan, the self-styled American Napoleon, is one of the most controversial figures of the American Civil War. General-in-chief of the entire Union army at one point, he led the Army of the Potomac through the disaster at Antietam Creek, was subsequently dismissed by Lincoln, and then ran against him in the 1864 presidential campaign. This collection of McClellan's candid letters about himself, his motivations, and his intentions reveals much fresh information on the military operations and political machinations he was involved with, and sheds new light on his complex personality. Stephen Sears, a Civil War expert, Prize-winning author, and biographer of McClellan, here lets this once-removed and now notorious commander speak of himself, providing us with an important first-hand view of what went on behind the scenes of America's greatest and most awful war.
"The majority of the stories of the Alamo fight have been partly legendary, partly hearsay and at best fragmentary. It has been left to John Myers Myers to present an exhaustively researched book which reveals the chronicle of the siege of the Alamo in an entirely different light. . . . Myers' story will stand as the best that has yet been written on the Alamo. . . . It's a classic." - Boston Post "Here is a historian with the vitality and drive to match his subject. A reporter of the first rank, he can clothe the dry bones of history with the living stuff of which today's news is made." - Chicago Tribune John Myers Myers authored sixteen books, including Doc Holliday and Tombstone's Early Years, also available as Bison Books.
Although prominent some would argue pre-eminent within the modern political lexicon, the concept of security is complex and contested. While the meaning and reference point of security was once largely taken for granted within International Relations, the past thirty years or so have witnessed the growth of a range of approaches that refuse to take this concept and its application as self-evident. Instead, serious scholarship, often grouped under the rubric of Critical Security Studies, has sought to question and critique dominant conceptions of security, to introduce new theoretical approaches to the assessment of security discourses and practices, and to expand the range of issues considered within security analysis. This new four-volume collection from Routledge provides a timely anthology of the subdiscipline s best and most influential scholarship to help users make sense of a now dizzyingly large body of literature and a continuing explosion in research output. Bringing together these major works in one easy-to-use reference resource, the collection illuminates the sometimes complex debates within and between different critical approaches to security, where even the meaning, form, and function of critique is itself contested. And, rather than attempting to impose a unitary or monolithic understanding of Critical Security Studies, the collection editors have instead captured the diversity and vibrancy of critical research on security by grouping the gathered materials into four interrelated themes: defining, deepening, broadening, and extending security. Volume I ( Defining Security ), collects a variety of critical perspectives on the meaning of the concept of security. Volume II ( Broadening Security ), meanwhile, presents arguments for and against the broadening of security to include issues such as environmental degradation, migration, and health. The third volume ( Deepening Security ) in the collection gathers assessments of the appropriate point of reference for security that range from the individual to the global level, while Volume IV ( Extending Security ) brings together materials that have sought to extend existing critical approaches, and to expand further the disciplinary boundaries of Security Studies. The collection is fully indexed and includes a comprehensive introduction that places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is destined to be valued by students, teachers, and researchers of Security Studies as well as those working in contiguous fields as a vital and unique resource.
Throughout history, from Kublai Khan's attempted invasions of Japan to Rommel's desert warfare, military operations have succeeded or failed on the ability of commanders to incorporate environmental conditions into their tactics. In "Battling the Elements," geographer Harold A. Winters and former U.S. Army officers Gerald E. Galloway Jr., William J. Reynolds, and David W. Rhyne, examine the connections between major battles in world history and their geographic components, revealing what role factors such as weather, climate, terrain, soil, and vegetation have played in combat. Each chapter offers a detailed and engaging explanation of a specific environmental factor and then looks at several battles that highlight its effects on military operations. As this cogent analysis of geography and war makes clear, those who know more about the shape, nature, and variability of battleground conditions will always have a better understanding of the nature of combat and at least one significant advantage over a less knowledgeable enemy.
From the moment the Civil War began, partisans on both sides were calling not just for victory but for extermination. And both sides found leaders who would oblige. In this vivid and fearfully persuasive book, Charles Royster looks at William Tecumseh Sherman and Stonewall Jackson, the men who came to embody the apocalyptic passions of North and South, and re-creates their characters, their strategies, and the feelings they inspired in their countrymen. At once an incisive dual biography, hypnotically engrossing military history, and a cautionary examination of the American penchant for patriotic bloodshed, The Destructive War is a work of enormous power.
"This is an inspiring story of courage and sacrifice--one hell of
an exciting true war story!"
The Greco-Persian Wars (499-449 BCE) convulsed Greece, Asia Minor and the Near East for half a century. Through a series of bloody invasions and pitched battles, the mighty Persian Empire pitted itself against the smaller armies of the Greeks, strengthened through strategic alliances. This epic conflict also brought together two different styles of warfare: the Greek hoplite phalanx and the combined spear and projectile weapon-armed Persian infantry. Analysing the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae and Plataea from the eyes of a soldier, this study explores the experience of front-line combat during the first two decades of the Greco-Persian Wars. Fully illustrated with modern photographs and archival images, and drawing directly on primary sources and the most authoritative recent research, this is the enthralling story of the fighting men of Greece and Persia and the tactics and technologies they employed.
In 1066 the English were conquered by the infamous invader, William the Conqueror. However this is not the whole story--the English did not roll over and die before their suppressors; far from it. Peter Rex brings to life the resistance, from those who allied themselves with the new regime to those who went "underground" to subvert it such as Hereward the Wake and Edric the Wild. He examines William's pacification attempts, alongside his notorious "harrying" of the north.
In 1066, the English were conquered by the infamous invader, William the Conqueror. However, this is not the whole story - the English did not roll over and die before their oppressors; far from it. For over five years, the English violently rebelled against the invading Norman people, murdering quislings, burning towns and sacking cathedrals. Peter Rex tells the story of each rebellion, their often colourful leaders (including Hereward the Wake, Edgar the Aetheling and Edric the Wild) and the rebels themselves, whom the Normans called 'silvatici' or forest dwellers. He also considers William's pacification attempts, especially his notorious 'harrying' of the north which amounted to genocide. If you thought it was all over with King Harold's death, this book reinforces the view that the English are not easily overcome.
In 1066, the English were conquered by the infamous invader, William the Conqueror. However, this is not the whole story--the English did not roll over and die before their oppressors; far from it. For over five years the English violently rebelled against the invading Norman people, murdering quislings, burning towns, and sacking cathedrals. Peter Rex tells the story of how each rebellion, their often colorful leaders (including Hereward the Wake, Edgar the Aetheling, and Edric the Wild) and the rebels themselves, whom the Normans called "silvatici" or forest dwellers. He also considers William's pacification attempts, especially his notorious "harrying" of the north which amounted to genocide. If you thought it was all over with King Harold's death, this book reinforces the view that the English are not easily overcome.
The 1763 Treaty of Paris ceded much of the continent east of the Mississippi to Great Britain, a claim which the Indian nations of the Great Lakes, who suddenly found themselves under British rule, considered outrageous. Unlike the French, with whom Great Lakes Indians had formed an alliance of convenience, the British entered the upper Great Lakes in a spirit of conquest. British officers on the frontier keenly felt the need to assert their assumed superiority over both Native Americans and European settlers. At the same time, Indian leaders expected appropriate tokens of British regard, gifts the British refused to give. It is this issue of respect that, according to Gregory Dowd, lies at the root of the war the Ottawa chief Pontiac and his alliance of Great Lakes Indians waged on the British Empire between 1763 and 1767. In War under Heaven, Dowd boldly reinterprets the causes and consequences of Pontiac's War. Where previous Anglocentric histories have ascribed this dramatic uprising to disputes over trade and land, this groundbreaking work traces the conflict back to status: both the low regard in which the British held the Indians and the concern among Native American leaders about their people's standing -- and their sovereignty -- in the eyes of the British. Pontiac's War also embodied a clash of world views, and Dowd examines the central role that Indian cultural practices and beliefs played in the conflict, explores the political and military culture of the British Empire which informed the attitudes its servants had toward Indians, provides deft and insightful portraits of Pontiac and his British adversaries, and offers a detailed analysis of the military and diplomaticstrategies of both sides. Imaginatively conceived and compellingly told, War under Heaven redefines our understanding of Anglo-Indian relations in the colonial period.
At once an in-depth history of this pivotal war and a guide to the historical sites where the ambushes, raids, and battles took place, King Philip's War expands our understanding of American history and provides insight into the nature of colonial and ethnic wars in general. Through a careful reconstruction of events, first-person accounts, period illustrations, and maps, and by providing information on the exact locations of more than fifty battles, King Philip's War is useful as well as informative. Students of history, colonial war buffs, those interested in Native American history, and anyone who is curious about how this war affected a particular New England town, will find important insights into one of the most seminal events to shape the American mind and continent. |
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