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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > War & defence operations
The Red River Campaign of 1864 was a bold attempt to send large
Union army and navy forces deep into the interior of Louisiana,
seize the Rebel capital of the state, and defeat the Confederate
army guarding the region enabling uninhibited access to Texas to
the west. Through the Howling Wilderness emphasizes the Confederate
defensive measures and the hostile attitudes of commanders toward
each other as well as toward their enemies. Gary D. Joiner contends
that the campaign was important to both the Union army and navy in
the course of the war and afterward, altering the political
landscape in the fall presidential elections in 1864. The campaign
redirected troops originally assigned to operate in Georgia during
the pivotal Atlanta campaign, thus delaying the end of the war by
weeks or even months, and it forced the navy to refocus its inland
or "brown water" naval tactics. The Red River Campaign ushered in
deep resentment toward the repatriation of the State of Louisiana
after the war ended. Profound consequences included legal,
political, and sociological issues that surfaced in Congressional
hearings as a result of the Union defeat. The efforts of the
Confederates to defend northern Louisiana have been largely
ignored. Their efforts at building an army and preparations to trap
the union naval forces before the campaign began have been all but
lost in the literature of the Civil War. Joiner's book will remedy
this lack of historical attention. Replete with in-depth coverage
on the geography of the region, the Congressional hearings after
the Campaign, and the Confederate defenses in the Red River Valley,
Through the Howling Wilderness will appeal to Civil War historians
and buffs alike.
Lauded for gallantry at Antietam and demoted for insubordination
after Fredericksburg, Major General William "Baldy" Smith remains a
controversial figure of the Civil War. His criticism of the Union
high command made him unpopular with both peers and superiors. Yet
his insight as an officer and an engineer enabled him to offer
effective solutions to challenges faced by fellow generals. In this
first comprehensive biography, Smith emerges as a field commander
with deep concern for his men and a fearless critic of the failures
of the Union generalship, who was recognized for a strategic
perspective that helped save Federal armies.
Since the publication of the first edition of The Crusades: A
Reader, interest in the Crusades has increased dramatically, fueled
in part by current global interactions between the Muslim world and
Western nations. The second edition features an intriguing new
chapter on perceptions of the Crusades in the modern period, from
David Hume and William Wordsworth to World War I political cartoons
and crusading rhetoric circulating after 9/11. Islamic accounts of
the treatment of prisoners have been added, as well as sources
detailing the homecoming of those who had ventured to the Holy
Land-including a newly translated reading on a woman crusader,
Margaret of Beverly. The book contains sixteen images, study
questions for each reading, and an index.
The United States during World War II was unprepared for one of
Germany's most destructive war efforts: a U-boat assault on Allied
ships in the Caribbean that sank about 400 tankers and merchant
ships, with few losses to the German submarine fleet. The Germans
had set up a network of spies and had the secret support of some
dictators, including the Dominican Republic's Rafael Trujillo,
supplying their U-boats with fuel.The Caribbean was of crucial
strategic importance to the Allies. Roughly 95 percent of the oil
sustaining the East Coast of the United States came from the
region, along with bauxite, required to manufacture airplanes. The
United States invested billions of dollars to build bases, landing
strips, roads, and other military infrastructure on the Puerto Rico
and secured a 99-year lease on all the British bases located in the
Caribbean. The United States also struck an agreement with neutral
Vichy France to keep the French Navy in the harbor of Martinique,
preventing it from being turned over to the Germans, in exchange
for a food supply for the island. Elsewhere, however, the German
blockade was taking a dire human toll. All of the islands
experienced a drastic food shortage. The US military buildup
created jobs and income, but locals were paid a third as much as
continental workers. The military also brought its segregationist
policies to the islands, creating further tensions and resentment.
The sacrifice of the Caribbean people was bitter, but their
participation in the war effort was also decisive: The U-boat
menace more or less disappeared from the region in late 1943,
thanks to their work building up the US military operation.
This is the remarkable story of one of the Second World War's most
unusual animal heroes - a 14-stone St Bernard dog who became global
mascot for the Royal Norwegian Forces and a symbol of freedom and
inspiration for Allied troops throughout Europe. From a happy and
carefree puppyhood spent as a family pet in the Norwegian fishing
town of Honningsvag, the gentle giant Bamse followed his master at
the outbreak of the war to become a registered crew member of the
mine-sweeper Thorodd. Often donning his own steel helmet as he took
his place in the Thorodd's bow gun turret, Bamse cut an impressive
figure and made a huge contribution to the morale of the crew, and
he gallantly saved the lives of two of them. After Norway fell to
the Germans in 1940, the Thorodd operated from Dundee and Montrose,
where Bamse became a well-known and much-loved figure, shepherding
the Thorodd's crew-members back to the boat at pub closing time,
travelling on the local buses, breaking up fights and even taking
part in football matches. Mourned both by locals and Norwegians
when he died in 1944, Bamse's memory has been kept alive both in
Norway, where he is still regarded as a national hero, and in
Montrose, where a larger-than-life statue of him was unveiled in
2006 by HRH Prince Andrew. Written from extensive source material
and eyewitness accounts, Sea Dog Bamse is a fitting tribute to the
extraordinary life of an extraordinary dog.
During the American Civil War, Maryland did not join the
Confederacy but nonetheless possessed divided loyalties and
sentiments. These divisions came to a head in the years that
followed the war. In Loyalty on the Line, David K. Graham argues
that Maryland did not adopt a unified postbellum identity and that
the state remained divided, with some identifying with the state's
Unionist efforts and others maintaining a connection to the
Confederacy and its defeated cause. Depictions of Civil War
Maryland, both inside and outside the state, hinged on
interpretations of the state's loyalty. The contested Civil War
memories of Maryland not only mirror a much larger national
struggle and debate but also reflect a conflict that is more
intense and vitriolic than that in the larger national narrative.
The close proximity of conflicting Civil War memories within the
state contributed to a perpetual contestation. In addition, those
outside the state also vigorously argued over the place of Maryland
in Civil War memory in order to establish its place in the divisive
legacy of the war. By using the dynamics interior to Maryland as a
lens for viewing the Civil War, Graham shows how divisive the war
remained and how central its memory would be to the United States
well into the twentieth century.
This eye-opening study gives a nuanced, provocative account of how
German soldiers in the Great War experienced and enacted
masculinity. Drawing on an array of relevant narratives and media,
it explores the ways that both heterosexual and homosexual soldiers
expressed emotion, understood romantic ideals, and approached
intimacy and sexuality.
This extraordinary book tells the story of a remarkable family
caught in Japan at the outbreak of the Second World War in the
Pacific. With letters, journal extracts and notes from Hamish
Brown's parents, as well as his own recollections, it brings the
era to life: not only life in the dying days of the British Empire,
but also the terrible reality of the invasion of Singapore into
which they escaped.
"Holocaust Remembrance Between the National and the Transnational"
provides a key study of the remembrance of the Jewish Catastrophe
and the Nazi-era past in the world arena. It uses a range of
primary documentation from the restitution conferences, speeches
and presentations made at the Stockholm International Forum of 2000
(SIF 2000), a global event and an attempt to mark a defining moment
in the inter-cultural construction of the political and
institutional memory of the Holocaust in the USA, Europe and
Israel. Containing oral history interviews with British delegates
to the conference and contemporary press reports, this book
explores the inter-relationships between global and national
Holocaust remembrances.The causes, consequences and 'cosmopolitan'
intellectual context for understanding the SIF 2000 are discussed
in great detail. Larissa Allwork examines this seminal moment in
efforts to globally promote the important, if ever controversial,
topics of Holocaust remembrance, worldwide Genocide prevention and
the commemoration of the Nazi past. Providing a balanced assessment
of the Stockholm Project, this book is an important study for those
interested in the remembrance of the Holocaust and the Third Reich,
as well as the recent global direction in memory studies.""
The war for colonial Africa
This very substantial book, written by the two South African
official correspondents on the campaign, narrates the expedition in
1914-15 which led to the conquest of German South-West Africa (the
region now known as Namibia). One author accompanied the Northern
Army and the other, the Southern Army. During the 19th century the
great powers of Europe raced to establish themselves in all corners
of the globe for colonisation, trade and political influence. In
the 'great scramble for Africa, ' the British and German empires
had established themselves, by degrees, in the east and west of the
continent. In the years before the outbreak of the First World War
these colonies existed, more or less, in harmony but once
hostilities erupted German and British settlers found themselves
living in very close proximity to hostile forces. The British had
the advantage of numbers since colonisation had long been a policy,
though the Germans compensated for this measure with the abilities
of their military commanders and the expertise and quality of their
European and locally raised troops. (South Africa itself entered
the fray, its forces led by commanders who a little over a decade
earlier had led the Boer burghers in their attempts to form a
nation independent of the British Empire.) This campaign of
mobility was fought in the searing heat of a desert region and was
often a 'tip and run affair' as mounted troops traversed huge
tracts of inhospitable terrain. Those interested in the First World
War often find it's 'side-show' theatres fascinating because they
differed so completely from the war of stalemate and attrition on
the Western Front. This is a very thorough and comprehensive book
written by competent authors who experienced the campaign at first
hand and were well qualified to record both their personal
impressions and an informed overview of the events they witnessed.
This edition of the text is liberally enhanced by the inclusion of
many photographs taken on the campaign.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each
title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our
hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their
spines and fabric head and tail bands.
In A World At War, 1911-1949, leading and emerging scholars of the
cultural history of the two world wars begin to break down the
traditional barriers between the historiographies of the two
conflicts, identifying commonalities as well as casting new light
on each as part of a broader mission, in honour of Professor John
Horne, to expand the boundaries of academic exploration of warfare
in the 20th century. Utilizing techniques and approaches developed
by cultural historians of the First World War, this volume
showcases and explores four crucial themes relating to the
socio-cultural attributes and representation of war that cut across
both the First and Second World Wars: cultural mobilization, the
nature and depiction of combat, the experience of civilians under
fire, and the different meanings of victory and defeat.
Contributors are: Annette Becker, Robert Dale, Alex Dowdall, Robert
Gerwarth, John Horne, Tomas Irish, Heather Jones, Alan Kramer,
Edward Madigan, Anthony McElligott, Michael S. Neiberg, John Paul
Newman, Catriona Pennell, Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses, Daniel Todman,
and Jay Winter. See inside the book.
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