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In this stirring biography of a brash, resourceful Churchill in his early twenties, Celia Sandys retraces her illustrious grandfather's path through South Africa as she reconstructs his adventures during nine months of the Anglo-Boer War at the end of the last century. She visits the campsites where the bold war correspondent and ready soldier bivouacked, the battlefields where he skirmished and fought, the site of his incarceration in Pretoria as the Boers' prisoner of war; she follows the rout...

Napoleon had a rich life of female accompaniment. Josephine was his love, but unable to have children, he divorced her in the cause of creating a dynasty. At the time of his divorce he remained deeply in love with Josephine and insisted she retained the title of Empress. Of his second wife, Louise, an Austrian princess, he said 'I have married a womb!' The second marriage was cold and somewhat unloving, but Napoleon remained under the delusion that she would follow him to Elba. In later years it...

The story of the Battle of Waterloo - of the ultimate defeat of Napoleon and the French, the triumph of Wellington, Blucher and their allied armies - is most often told from the viewpoint of the victors, not the vanquished. Even after 200 years of intensive research and the publication of hundreds of books and articles on the battle, the French perspective and many of the primary French sources are under-represented in the written record. So it is high time this weakness in the literature - and...

Scholars hail the find as "the most important discovery in Civil War scholarship in the last half century." The invaluable cache of Confederate General John Bell Hood's personal papers includes wartime and postwar letters from comrades, subordinates, former enemies and friends, exhaustive medical reports relating to Hood's two major wounds, and dozens of touching letters exchanged between Hood and his wife, Anna. This treasure trove of information is being made available for the first time for b...

George Frederick 'Fred' Dallas wrote 137 letters to his family and friends while on active service in the Crimea. A company commander in the 46th Foot, his first letters reflect a soldier's enthusiasm for the 'brilliant affair' that awaits the British Army overseas. Within weeks of arriving, excitement turns to disbelief at the continual misjudgement of his leaders. Poor preparation and divided command exposed the troops to surprise attacks from 'The Russe', and to the appalling conditions of th...

This book re-assesses the significance to Pre-Raphaelitism of the fundamental relationship of poem to painting, of the visual to the verbal, to examine those aspects of the movement that account for its enduring legacy. Beginning with the profound and somewhat neglected influence of Ruskin's work upon the poets and painters, Smith focuses in particular upon the Pre-Raphaelite rehabilitation of the sister arts analogy, and an aesthetic of ekphrasis as played out in the short-lived periodical The...

First published in 1946. In this study of Russian theatre, the author explores the developments of drama and the theatre throughout the nineteenth-century. Macleod examines imperial and serf theatres, the impact of Russian drama on the east and west, and the regeneration of theatre at the start of the twentieth-century. This title will be of great interest to students of Theatre Studies and Russian History.

Arriving at the port of New York in 1882, a 27-year-old Oscar Wilde quipped he had "nothing to declare but my genius." But as Roy Morris, Jr., reveals in this sparkling narrative, Wilde was, for the first time in his life, underselling himself. A chronicle of the sensation that was Wilde's eleven-month speaking tour of America, Declaring His Genius offers an indelible portrait of both Oscar Wilde and the Gilded Age.Wilde covered 15,000 miles, delivered 140 lectures, and met everyone who was anyo...

A comprehensive history of the Sino-Russian border, one of the longest and most important land borders in the worldThe Sino-Russian border, once the world's longest land border, has received scant attention in histories about the margins of empires. Beyond the Steppe Frontier rectifies this by exploring the demarcation's remarkable transformation-from a vaguely marked frontier in the seventeenth century to its twentieth-century incarnation as a tightly patrolled barrier girded by watchtowers, ba...

Where do democratic political practices originate? This issue has long concerned republics, but few historians have studied the process by which people learn the skills of rights-based government. In this illuminating history, Amy Wiese Forbes addresses these origins by analyzing how republicanism took shape through the political satire that flooded French newspapers, theaters, courtrooms, and even academic life in 1830. Forbes shows that satire was the chief source of the critical spirit of rep...

The Settler Colonial Present explores the ways in which settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination informs the global present. It presents an argument regarding its extraordinary resilience and diffusion and reflects on the need to imagine its decolonisation.

Disentangling a controversial history of turmoil and progress, this Handbook provides essential guidance through the complex past of a region that was previously known as the Balkans but is now better known as Southeastern Europe. It gathers 47 international scholars and researchers from the region. They stand back from the premodern claims and recent controversies stirred by the wars of Yugoslavia's dissolution. Parts I and II explore shifting early modern divisions among three empires to the...

On December 4th, 1872, a 100-foot brigantine was discovered drifting through the North Atlantic without a soul on board. Not a sign of struggle, not a shred of damage, no ransacked cargo—and not a trace of the captain, his wife and daughter, or the crew. What happened on board the ghost ship Mary Celeste has baffled and tantalized the world for 130 years. In his stunning new book, award-winning journalist Brian Hicks plumbs the depths of this fabled nautical mystery and finally uncovers the trut...

This study details the preparation, planning and execution of the invasion of Portugal in 1810 by the French Armee de Portugal under Marshal Massena, and the defensive measures taken by the British and their Portuguese and Spanish allies. It also covers the practice of all armies involved during this campaign, working from original sources. These sources provide a different interpretation of some key aspects of the campaign to those which are generally accepted. The work focusses on the strategi...