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Books > Humanities > History > History of specific subjects > Military history
Writing the Rebellion presents a cultural history of loyalist
writing in early America. There has been a spate of related works
recently, but Philip Gould's narrative offers a completely
different view of the loyalist/patriot contentions than appears in
any of these accounts. By focusing on the literary projections of
the loyalist cause, Gould dissolves the old legend that loyalists
were more British than American, and patriots the embodiment of a
new sensibility drawn from their American situation and upbringing.
He shows that both sides claimed to be heritors of British civil
discourse, Old World learning, and the genius of English culture.
The first half of Writing Rebellion deals with the ways "political
disputation spilled into arguments about style, form, and
aesthetics, as though these subjects could secure (or ruin) the
very status of political authorship." Chapters in this section
illustrate how loyalists attack patriot rhetoric by invoking
British satires of an inflated Whig style by Alexander Pope and
Jonathan Swift. Another chapter turns to Loyalist critiques of
Congressional language and especially the Continental Association,
which was responsible for radical and increasingly violent measures
against the Loyalists. The second half of Gould's book looks at
satiric adaptations of the ancient ballad tradition to see what
happens when patriots and loyalists interpret and adapt the same
text (or texts) for distinctive yet related purposes. The last two
chapters look at the Loyalist response to Thomas Paine's Common
Sense and the ways the concept of the author became defined in
early America. Throughout the manuscript, Gould acknowledges the
purchase English literary culture continued to have in
revolutionary America, even among revolutionaries.
Why put Abraham Lincoln, the sometime corporate lawyer and American
President, in dialogue with Karl Marx, the intellectual
revolutionary? On the surface, they would appear to share few
interests. Yet, though Lincoln and Marx never met one another, both
had an abiding interest in the most important issue of the
nineteenth-century Atlantic world-the condition of labor in a
capitalist world, one that linked slave labor in the American south
to England's (and continental Europe's) dark satanic mills. Each
sought solutions-Lincoln through a polity that supported free men,
free soil, and free labor; Marx by organizing the working class to
resist capitalist exploitation. While both men espoused
emancipation for American slaves, here their agreements ended.
Lincoln thought that the free labor society of the American North
provided great opportunities for free men missing from the American
South, a kind of "farm ladder" that gave every man the ability to
become a landowner. Marx thought such "free land" a chimera and
(with information from German-American correspondents), was certain
that the American future lay in the proletarianized cities. Abraham
Lincoln and Karl Marx in Dialogue intersperses short selections
from the two writers from their voluminous works, opening with an
introduction that puts the ideas of the two men in the broad
context of nineteenth-century thought and politics. The volume
excerpts Lincoln's and Marx's views on slavery (they both opposed
it for different reasons), the Civil War (Marx claimed the war
concerned slavery and should have as its goal abolition; Lincoln
insisted that his goal was just the defeat of the Confederacy), and
the opportunities American free men had to gain land and economic
independence. Through this volume, readers will gain a firmer
understanding of nineteenth-century labor relations throughout the
Atlantic world: slavery and free labor; the interconnections
between slave-made cotton and the exploitation of English
proletarians; and the global impact of the American Civil War.
Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations in
the Spanish Civil War.
The Other Civil War offers historian and activist Howard Zinn's
view of the social and civil background of the American Civil
War--a view that is rarely provided in standard historical texts.
Drawn from his New York Times bestseller A People's History of the
United States, this set of essays recounts the history of American
labor, free and not free, in the years leading up to and during the
Civil War. He offers an alternative yet necessary account of that
terrible nation-defining epoch.
In Spectacular Men, Sarah E. Chinn investigates how working class
white men looked to the early American theatre for examples of
ideal manhood. Theatre-going was the primary source of
entertainment for working people of the early Republic and the
Jacksonian period, and plays implicitly and explicitly addressed
the risks and rewards of citizenship. Ranging from representations
of the heroes of the American Revolution to images of doomed
Indians to plays about ancient Rome, Chinn unearths dozens of plays
rarely read by critics. Spectacular Men places the theatre at the
center of the self-creation of working white men, as voters, as
workers, and as Americans.
Among the voyages of exploration and surveying in the late 18th
century, that of Alejandro Malaspina best represents the high
ideals and scientific interests of the Enlightenment. Italian-born,
Malaspina entered the Spanish navy in 1774. In September 1788 he
and fellow-officer Jose Bustamante submitted a plan to the Ministry
of Marine for a voyage of survey and inspection to Spanish
territories in the Americas and Philippines. The expedition was to
produce hydrographic charts for the use of Spanish merchantmen and
warships and to report on the political, economic and defensive
state of Spain's overseas possessions. The plan was approved and in
July 1789 Malaspina and Bustamante sailed from CA!diz in the
purpose-built corvettes, Descubierta and Atrevida. On board the
vessels were scientists and artists and an array of the latest
surveying and astronomical instruments. The voyage lasted more than
five years. On his return Malaspina was promoted Brigadier de la
Real Armada, and began work on an account of the voyage in seven
volumes to dwarf the narratives of his predecessors in the Pacific
such as Cook and Bougainville. Among much else, it would contain
sweeping recommendations for reform in the governance of Spain's
overseas empire. But Malaspina became involved in political
intrigue. In November 1795 he was arrested, stripped of his rank
and sentenced to life imprisonment. Although released in 1803,
Malaspina spent the last seven years of his life in obscure
retirement in Italy. He never resumed work on the great edition,
and his journal was not published in Spain until 1885. Only in
recent years has a multi-volume edition appeared under the auspices
of the Museo Naval, Madrid, that does justice to the achievements
of what for long was a forgotten voyage. This first volume of a
series of three contains Malaspina's diario or journal from 31 July
1789 to 14 December 1790, newly translated into English, with
substantial introduction and commentary. Among the places visited
and described are Montevideo, Puerto Deseado, Port Egmont, Puerto
San Carlos, ValparaA so, Callao, Guayaquil and PanamA!. Other texts
include Malaspina's introduction to his intended edition, and his
correspondence with the Minister of the Marine before and during
the voyage.
Conventional wisdom holds that the US Army in Vietnam, thrust into
an unconventional war where occupying terrain was a meaningless
measure of success, depended on body counts as its sole measure of
military progress. In No Sure Victory, Army officer and historian
Gregory Daddis looks far deeper into the Army's techniques for
measuring military success and presents a much more complicated-and
disturbing-account of the American misadventure in Indochina.
Daddis shows how the US Army, which confronted an unfamiliar enemy
and an even more unfamiliar form of warfare, adopted a massive, and
eventually unmanageable, system of measurements and formulas to
track the progress of military operations that ranged from
pacification efforts to search-and-destroy missions. The Army's
monthly "Measurement of Progress" reports covered innumerable
aspects of the fighting in Vietnam-force ratios, Vietcong/North
Vietnamese Army incidents, tactical air sorties, weapons losses,
security of base areas and roads, population control, area control,
and hamlet defenses. Concentrating more on data collection and less
on data analysis, these indiscriminate attempts to gauge success
may actually have hindered the army's ability to evaluate the true
outcome of the fight at hand--a roadblock that Daddis believes
significantly contributed to the many failures that American forces
suffered in Vietnam.
Filled with incisive analysis and rich historical detail, No Sure
Victory is not only a valuable case study in unconventional
warfare, but a cautionary tale that offers important perspectives
on how to measure performance in current and future armed conflict.
Given America's ongoing counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and
Afghanistan, No Sure Victory provides valuable historical
perspective on how to measure--and mismeasure--military success.
On July 11, 1864, some residents cheered and others watched in
horror as Confederate troops spread across the fields and orchards
of Silver Spring, Maryland. Many fled to the capital while General
Jubal Early's troops ransacked their property. The estate of
Lincoln's postmaster general, Montgomery Blair, was burned, and his
father's home was used by Early as headquarters from which to
launch an attack on Washington's defenses. Yet the first Civil War
casualty in Silver Spring came well before Early's raid, when Union
soldiers killed a prominent local farmer in 1862. This was life in
the shadow of the Federal City. Drawing on contemporary accounts
and memoirs, Dr. Robert E. Oshel tells the story of Silver Spring
over the tumultuous course of the Civil War.
Told here for the first time is the compelling story of the Bluff
City during the Civil War. Historian and preservationist Mike Bunn
takes you from the pivotal role Eufaula played in Alabama's
secession and early enthusiasm for the Confederate cause to its
aborted attempt to become the state's capital and its ultimate
capture by Union forces, chronicling the effects of the conflict on
Eufaulans along the way. "Civil War Eufaula "draws on a wide range
of firsthand individual perspectives, including those of husbands
and wives, political leaders, businessmen, journalists, soldiers,
students and slaves, to produce a mosaic of observations on shared
experiences. Together, they communicate what it was like to live in
this riverside trading town during a prolonged and cataclysmic war.
It is the story of ordinary people in extraordinary times.
At the start of the Civil War, Knoxville, Tennessee, with a
population of just over 4,000, was considered a prosperous
metropolis little reliant on slavery. Although the surrounding
countryside was predominantly Unionist in sympathy, Knoxville
itself was split down the middle, with Union and Confederate
supporters even holding simultaneous political rallies at opposite
ends of the town's main street. Following Tennessee's secession,
Knoxville soon became famous (or infamous) as a stronghold of
stalwart Unionism, thanks to the efforts of a small cadre who
persisted in openly denouncing the Confederacy. Throughout the
course of the Civil War, Knoxville endured military occupation for
all but three days, hosting Confederate troops during the first
half of the conflict and Union forces throughout the remainder,
with the transition punctuated by an extended siege and bloody
battle during which nearly forty thousand soldiers fought over the
town.
In Lincolnites and Rebels, Robert Tracy McKenzie tells the story
of Civil War Knoxville-a perpetually occupied, bitterly divided
Southern town where neighbor fought against neighbor. Mining a
treasure-trove of manuscript collections and civil and military
records, McKenzie reveals the complex ways in which allegiance
altered the daily routine of a town gripped in a civil war within
the Civil War and explores the agonizing personal decisions that
war made inescapable. Following the course of events leading up to
the war, occupation by Confederate and then Union soldiers, and the
troubled peace that followed the war, Lincolnites and Rebels
details in microcosm the conflict and paints a complex portrait of
a border state, neither wholly North norSouth.
Finalist, Jefferson Davis Award, Museum of the Confederacy
Early work in conflict resolution and peace research focused on why
wars broke out, why they persisted, and why peace agreements failed
to endure. Later research has focused on what actions and
circumstances have actually averted destructive escalations,
stopped the perpetuation of destructive conduct, produced a
relatively good conflict transformation, or resulted in an enduring
and relatively equitable relationship among former adversaries.
This later research, which began in the 1950s, recognizes that
conflict is inevitable and is often waged in the name of rectifying
injustice. Additionally, it argues that damages can be minimized
and gains maximized for various stakeholders in waging and settling
conflicts. This theory, which is known as the constructive conflict
approach, looks at how conflicts can be waged and resolved so they
are broadly beneficial rather than mutually destructive. In this
book, Louis Kriesberg, one of the major figures in the school of
constructive conflict, looks at every major foreign conflict
episode in which the United States has been involved since the
onset of the Cold War to analyze when American involvement in
foreign conflicts has been relatively effective and beneficial and
when it has not. In doing so he analyzes whether the US took
constructive approaches to conflict and whether the approach
yielded better consequences than more traditional coercive
approaches. Realizing Peace helps readers interested in engaging or
learning about foreign policy to better understand what has
happened in past American involvement in foreign conflicts, to
think freshly about better alternatives, and to act in support of
more constructive strategies in the future.
A military operation unlike any other on American soil, Morgan's
Raid was characterized by incredible speed, superhuman endurance
and innovative tactics. One of the nation's most colorful leaders,
Confederate general John Hunt Morgan, took his cavalry through
enemy-occupied territory in three states in one of the longest
offensives of the Civil War. The effort produced the only battles
fought north of the Ohio River and reached farther north than any
other regular Confederate force. With twenty-five maps and more
than forty illustrations, Morgan's Raid historian David L. Mowery
takes a new look at this unprecedented event in American history,
one historians rank among the world's greatest land-based raids
since Elizabethan times.
Leonidas Polk is one of the most fascinating figures of the Civil
War. Consecrated as a bishop of the Episcopal Church and
commissioned as a general into the Confederate army, Polk's life in
both spheres blended into a unique historical composite. Polk was a
man with deep religious convictions but equally committed to the
Confederate cause. He baptized soldiers on the eve of bloody
battles, administered last rites and even presided over officers'
weddings, all while leading his soldiers into battle. Historian
Cheryl White examines the life of this soldier-saint and the legacy
of a man who unquestionably brought the first viable and lively
Protestant presence to Louisiana and yet represents the politics of
one of the darkest periods in American history.
On September 10, 1813, the hot, still air that hung over Lake Erie
was broken by the sounds of sharp conflict. Led by Oliver Hazard
Perry, the American fleet met the British, and though they
sustained heavy losses, Perry and his men achieved one of the most
stunning victories in the War of 1812. Author Walter Rybka traces
the Lake Erie Campaign from the struggle to build the fleet in
Erie, Pennsylvania, during the dead of winter and the conflict
between rival egos of Perry and his second in command, Jesse Duncan
Elliott, through the exceptionally bloody battle that was the first
U.S. victory in a fleet action. With the singular perspective of
having sailed the reconstructed U.S. brig Niagara for over twenty
years, Rybka brings the knowledge of a shipmaster to the story of
the Lake Erie Campaign and the culminating Battle of Lake Erie.
Bush Brothers is not about special forces or heroic, secret missions. Instead, it is an intimate look at the daily life of ordinary soldiers – and the unbreakable bonds they formed under fire.
This is the story of thousands of infantry men who were deployed in the SADF, on or across the Border.
Colourful characters and wild partying are interspersed with the life-and-death choices troops were forced to make as they sacrificed life and limb, not so much for their country, but for each other.
Virginia's Shenandoah Valley was known as the "Breadbasket of the
Confederacy" due to its ample harvests and transportation centers,
its role as an avenue of invasion into the North and its capacity
to serve as a diversionary theater of war. The region became a
magnet for both Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War,
and nearly half of the thirteen major battles fought in the valley
occurred as part of General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's 1862
Valley Campaign. Civil War historian Jonathan A. Noyalas examines
Jackson's Valley Campaign and how those victories brought hope to
an infant Confederate nation, transformed the lives of the
Shenandoah Valley's civilians and emerged as Stonewall Jackson's
defining moment.
In the summer of 1781, during the seventh year of the Revolutionary
War, the allied American and French armies of Generals Washington
and Rochambeau were encamped at Dobbs Ferry, Ardsley, Hartsdale,
Edgemont and White Plains. Washington chose lower Westchester for
encampment because of its proximity to the British forces which
controlled Manhattan, and which Washington intended to attack.On
August 14 Washington and Rochambeau received a communication from
French Admiral de Grasse, who suggested a joint sea and land
campaign against General Cornwallis's British troops in Virginia.
Washington risked all on this march. Its success depended on
precise timing and coordination of multiple naval and land
movements including those of Generals Washington, Rochambeau and
Lafayette, and of French Admirals de Grasse and Barras. Success
also required the utmost secrecy, and an elaborate deception was
prepared by Washington in order to convince the British that
Manhattan remained the target of the allied armies. Two months
later, at Yorktown, Virginia, Cornwallis surrendered his entire
army to the American and French forces.
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