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Dead Men Telling Tales is an original account of the lasting cultural impact made by the autobiographies of Napoleonic soldiers over the course of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the nearly three hundred military memoirs published by British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese veterans of the Peninsular War (1808-1814), Matilda Greig charts the histories of these books over the course of a hundred years, around Europe and the Atlantic, and from writing to publication to afterlife. Drawing on extensive archival research in multiple languages, she challenges assumptions made by historians about the reliability of these soldiers' direct eyewitness accounts, revealing the personal and political...
Explores British soldiers' violence and restraint towards enemy combatants and civilians in sieges during the Napoleonic era.
After the Battle of Waterloo, Britain actively incorporated the victory into their national identity. Who Owned Waterloo? demonstrates that Waterloo's significance to Britain's national psyche resulted in a different battle: one in which civilian and military groups fought to establish claims on different aspects of the battle and its remembrance.
The eighteenth century saw more years of war than of peace. Though victimhood might jump most readily to mind when thinking about how this affected young people, it is only a small part of the picture. The Seven Years' War and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars influenced how children played, learned, worked, and perceived the world around them, regardless of whether they were in the heart of the battle or far from the action. Childhood and War in Eighteenth-Century Britain considers how British and foreign youngsters affected the waging of war, not only as stalwart camp followers, boy soldiers, patriotic civilians, and bereaved victims, but also as evocative images of innocence, inabilit...
A major new history of the Royal Navy during the tumultuous age of revolution The French Revolutionary Wars catapulted Britain into a conflict against a new enemy: Republican France. Britain relied on the Royal Navy to protect its shores and empire, but as radical ideas about rights and liberty spread across the globe, it could not prevent the spirit of revolution from reaching its ships. In this insightful history, James Davey tells the story of Britain's Royal Navy across the turbulent 1790s. As resistance and rebellion swept through the fleets, the navy itself became a political battleground. This was a conflict fought for principles as well as power. Sailors organized riots, strikes, petitions, and mutinies to achieve their goals. These shocking events dominated public discussion, prompting cynical--and sometimes brutal--responses from the government. Tempest uncovers the voices of ordinary sailors to shed new light on Britain's war with France, as the age of revolution played out at every level of society.
A history of colonial legacies in United Nations peacekeeping operations in the aftermath of the Second World War.
While the 1914 Christmas truces have a mythological status in British culture, intimate interactions with the enemy are, this interdisciplinary edited collection shows, a staple of modern warfare. Spanning multiple conflicts around the world, from the nineteenth century to the present Russia/Ukraine war, the chapters consider how fellow-feeling with the enemy during war has been both fueled and limited by constellations of class, gender, nationality, race, religion, sexuality, and shared experience. Scrutinizing asymmetries of power in enemy encounters, the instability of divisions between allies and enemies, and the heterogeneity of experiences within one army or side, contributors to this ...
Narratives of War considers the way war and battle are remembered and narrated across space and time in Europe in the twentieth century. The book reflects on how narratives are generated and deployed, and on their function as coping mechanisms, means of survival, commemorative gestures, historical records and evidence. The contributions address such issues as the tension and discrepancy between memory and the official chronicling of war, the relationship between various individuals’ versions of war narratives and the ways in which events are brought together to serve varied functions for the narrators and their audiences. Drawing upon the two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War and the ex-Yu...