Author: Stanley D. M. Carpenter Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press ISBN: 0806163348 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 329
Book Description
In a world rife with conflict and tension, how does a great power prosecute an irregular war at a great distance within the context of a regional struggle, all within a global competitive environment? The question, so pertinent today, was confronted by the British nearly 250 years ago during the American War for Independence. And the answer, as this book makes plain, is: not the way the British, under Lieutenant General Charles, Earl Cornwallis, went about it in the American South in the years 1778–81. Southern Gambit presents a closely observed, comprehensive account of this failed strategy. Approaching the campaign from the British perspective, this book restores a critical but little-studied chapter to the narrative of the Revolutionary War—and in doing so, it adds detail and depth to our picture of Cornwallis, an outsize figure in the history of the British Empire. Distinguished scholar of military strategy Stanley D. M. Carpenter outlines the British strategic and operational objectives, devoting particular attention to the strategy of employing Southern Loyalists to help defeat Patriot forces, reestablish royal authority, and tamp down resurgent Patriot activity. Focusing on Cornwallis’s operations in the Carolinas and Virginia leading to the surrender at Yorktown in October 1781, Carpenter reveals the flaws in this approach, most notably a fatal misunderstanding of the nature of the war in the South and of the Loyalists’ support. Compounding this was the strategic incoherence of seeking a conventional war against a brilliant, unconventional opponent, and doing so amidst a breakdown in the unity of command. Ultimately, strategic incoherence, ineffective command and control, and a misreading of the situation contributed to the series of cascading failures of the British effort. Carpenter’s analysis of how and why this happened expands our understanding of British decision-making and operations in the Southern Campaign and their fateful consequences in the War for Independence.
Author: Phillip Thomas Tucker Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 0811770621 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 347
Book Description
After failing to defeat the Continental Army in New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania during the first half of the Revolutionary War, British generals decided to turn south, where they believed they could win the war in a region more heavily populated by Loyalists. In late 1778, a British expeditionary force sailed south from New York City and captured Savannah, which became a British base of operations and strategic hinge. To thwart the British, an international force gathered around Savannah, including Americans, Poles, Germans, Irish, and—significantly—a volunteer force of free Blacks from present-day Haiti: the Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue. The Chasseurs constituted the largest Black military unit in the American Revolution. The soldiers were free men, the sons of French fathers, mostly sugar plantation owners, and slave mothers in France’s most prosperous overseas colony. In the fall of 1779, this force joined the attack on the British at Savannah in a series of frontal results. The French and Americans were repulsed at great cost in lives, but the free Black Haitians stood their ground—and, in a moment of high courage that has never received its due, stymied a British counterattack that salvaged the day for the Americans and French. A rock at Savannah on behalf of the American Revolution, many of the Haitian survivors of the battle went on to serve the cause of liberty in the Haitian Revolution and help found the first Black republic in world history. This is their story.
Author: Huw J. Davies Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 030026853X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 457
Book Description
A compelling history of the British Army in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—showing how the military gathered knowledge from campaigns across the globe “Superb analysis.”—William Anthony Hay, Wall Street Journal At the outbreak of the War of Austrian Succession in 1742, the British Army’s military tactics were tired and outdated, stultified after three decades of peace. The army’s leadership was conservative, resistant to change, and unable to match new military techniques developing on the continent. Losses were cataclysmic and the force was in dire need of modernization—both in terms of strategy and in leadership and technology. In this wide-ranging and highly original account, Huw J. Davies traces the British Army’s accumulation of military knowledge across the following century. An essentially global force, British armies and soldiers continually gleaned and synthesized strategy from war zones the world over: from Europe to the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Davies records how the army and its officers put this globally acquired knowledge to use, exchanging information and developing into a remarkable vehicle of innovation—leading to the pinnacle of its military prowess in the nineteenth century.
Author: Phillip Thomas Tucker Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1510769366 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 330
Book Description
Discover the little-known role Alexander Hamilton played in the decisive battle of the American Revolution: Yorktown. Alexander Hamilton and the Battle of Yorktown, October 1781 is the first book in nearly two and a half centuries that has ever been devoted to the story of Alexander Hamilton’s key contributions in winning the most decisive victory the of the American Revolutionary war at Yorktown. Past biographies of Hamilton, including the most respected ones, have minimized the overall importance of the young lieutenant colonel’s role and battlefield performance at Yorktown, which was key to forcing the surrender of Lord Cornwallis’s army. Hamilton led the assault on strategic Redoubt Number Ten, located on the left flank of the British defensive line, and captured the defensive bastion—an accomplishment that ensured the defeat and surrender of Cornwallis’s army that won the American Revolution and changed the course of world history. You thought you knew the full story of the founding father of the American financial system from Lin Manual Miranda's Broadway smash hit Hamilton, but Alexander Hamilton and the Battle of Yorktown, October 1781 brings into sharp relief the vital role he played in the most important battle of the American Revolution, as told by renowned historian Phillip Thomas Ticker, PhD.
Author: John Ferling Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 1635572770 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 753
Book Description
Co-Winner of the 2022 Harry M. Ward Book Prize From celebrated historian John Ferling, the underexplored history of the second half of the Revolutionary War, when, after years of fighting, American independence often seemed beyond reach. It was 1778, and the recent American victory at Saratoga had netted the U.S a powerful ally in France. Many, including General George Washington, presumed France's entrance into the war meant independence was just around the corner. Meanwhile, having lost an entire army at Saratoga, Great Britain pivoted to a “southern strategy.” The army would henceforth seek to regain its southern colonies, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, a highly profitable segment of its pre-war American empire. Deep into 1780 Britain's new approach seemed headed for success as the U.S. economy collapsed and morale on the home front waned. By early 1781, Washington, and others, feared that France would drop out of the war if the Allies failed to score a decisive victory that year. Sir Henry Clinton, commander of Britain's army, thought “the rebellion is near its end.” Washington, who had been so optimistic in 1778, despaired: “I have almost ceased to hope.” Winning Independence is the dramatic story of how and why Great Britain-so close to regaining several southern colonies and rendering the postwar United States a fatally weak nation ultimately failed to win the war. The book explores the choices and decisions made by Clinton and Washington, and others, that ultimately led the French and American allies to clinch the pivotal victory at Yorktown that at long last secured American independence.
Author: James R. Mc Intyre Publisher: Knox Press ISBN: 1682619419 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 479
Book Description
Johann Ewald began as a commoner in one of the states of the Holy Roman Empire who rose above the constraints of his time. As a soldier he fought in all of the great conflict of the latter eighteenth century, the Seven Years’ War, the American War of Independence and the Napoleonic Wars. He keenly recorded his observations of both the people he met and places he encountered throughout these adventures. Through all of his experiences, he remained a soldiers’ soldier. Due to his observations on the conduct of irregular warfare in his time, he has become on the most important authorities on eighteenth century small-unit tactics. His writings provide a unique insight on the major events of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Johann von Ewald stood as one of the most accomplished practitioners of irregular warfare in the eighteenth century. Beginning his military career in the Seven Years’ War, and continuing through the American War of Independence, he amassed a vast wealth of experience leading troops in the art of irregular warfare or petite guerre. He later wrote several works based on his experiences, and at least one of these received the favorable comment of Frederick the Great, the warrior King of Prussia. In addition, Ewald composed for the members of his family a diary of his experiences in the American War of Independence. Later on, he served in the Danish Army during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Among all but a small group of dedicated scholars of the American War of Independence, however, Johann von Ewald has vanished into obscurity. There are no other English language biographies of Ewald, and only a few articles in German that date to the nineteenth century. It is the purpose of this work to rescue him from oblivion. Telling Ewald’s story, therefore, tells much of the story of warfare in the second half of the eighteenth century. Instead of focusing on the great battles, however, Ewald’s biography focuses on the conduct of irregular operations: raids, ambushes and the like. Ewald allows readers a view into this often neglected dimension of eighteenth century warfare, and the proposed biography will thoroughly explore the topic through his writings, both his military treatises and his diary of the American War of Independence.
Author: Stephen M. Feldman Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226240746 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 596
Book Description
From the 1798 Sedition Act to the war on terror, numerous presidents, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and local officials have endorsed the silencing of free expression. If the connection between democracy and the freedom of speech is such a vital one, why would so many governmental leaders seek to quiet their citizens? Free Expression and Democracy in America traces two rival traditions in American culture—suppression of speech and dissent as a form of speech—to provide an unparalleled overview of the law, history, and politics of individual rights in the United States. Charting the course of free expression alongside the nation’s political evolution, from the birth of the Constitution to the quagmire of the Vietnam War, Stephen M. Feldman argues that our level of freedom is determined not only by the Supreme Court, but also by cultural, social, and economic forces. Along the way, he pinpoints the struggles of excluded groups—women, African Americans, and laborers—to participate in democratic government as pivotal to the development of free expression. In an age when our freedom of speech is once again at risk, this momentous book will be essential reading for legal historians, political scientists, and history buffs alike.
Author: The Museum of the American Revolution The Museum of the American Revolution Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 0811770680 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 145
Book Description
Using a masterful combination of “artistry and accuracy” (New York Times),nationally renowned historical artist Don Troiani has dedicated much of his career to transforming the modern understanding of what the Revolutionary War truly looked like. His research-based paintings capture the reality and drama of crucial moments such as the 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill, General Washington’s daring 1776 attack on Trenton, and the American and French victory at Yorktown in 1781. Liberty: Don Troiani’s Paintings of the Revolutionary War, the book that serves as catalog for the exhibit of Troiani’s work at the Museum of the American Revolution, highlights the most pivotal events of America’s fight for independence and reveals Troiani’s research-based artistic process. For the first time in a museum, this special exhibition brings together over forty of Troiani’s original Revolutionary War paintings and pairs them with forty artifacts from his personal collection, that of the Museum, and several private collectors. https://www.amrevmuseum.org/exhibits/liberty-or-death-don-troiani-s-paintings-of-the-revolutionary-war The exhibit and the book unveil Troiani’s latest canvas, a painting of the young African American sailor and Philadelphian James Forten witnessing Black and Native American troops in the ranks of the Continental Army as they march past Independence Hall on their way to Yorktown, Virginia.The painting was commissioned in 2019 by the Museum with funding provided by the Washington-Rochambeau Revolutionary Route National Historic Trail of the National Park Service. The exhibit will be open from October 16, 2021 to September 5, 2022.
Author: Michael Grimwood Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 0820333700 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 402
Book Description
Heart in Conflict is a study of two periods of intense vocational crisis in William Faulkner's career as a writer: his time of apprenticeship, before the composition of The Sound and the Fury, and the beginnings, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, of the long season of decline that followed the completion of Absalom, Absalom! These periods of crisis, Michael Grimwood argues, grew out of an ongoing tension between the divided components of Faulkner's personality between two versions of himself: the illiterate bumpkin and the sophisticated aesthete. It was a collaboration between these two postures that formed Faulkner's vocation, that created the impulse to translate the rural, unlettered world of Oxford, Mississippi, into a literature of the highest ambitions. But Faulkner was neither bumpkin nor aesthete. His awareness of the fraudulence of both his self-images, and ultimately his art, caused him to create, beginning with The Wild Palms in 1939, novels divided against themselves both structurally and thematically, novels whose complexities emanate from their author's own complex personality. Grimwood traces the formation of Faulkner's divided personality in his childhood and youth, in the conflicting influences of literature and landscape, in the conflicting urges wrought by a mother who called him to the rigors of the schoolhouse and a father whose interests led to the diffuse pleasure of the world outside. The conflict gained dimension when Faulkner's earliest poems, written in the style of the European pastoral, were mocked by students in the pages of the University of Mississippi literary magazine. Faulkner internalized this mockery, and it would emerge in the late 1930s and early 1940s as a destructively self-critical compulsion to write novels--The Wild Palms, The Hamlet, Knight's Gambit, and Go Down, Moses--that were simultaneously pastoral and mock-pastoral, that reflected both an impulse to bequeath his own substance through words and a virtual surrender to illiteracy. In many ways, the tensions that divided Faulkner--tensions between pastoral ideal and rural reality, between flights of language and attachment to the wordless soil--also divided the whole of southern literature and society from the time of its origins. Such conflicts can be found in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, philosopher of democracy and slaveowner; in the southwestern humor and plantation fiction that dominated southern letters in the 1830s; and in the works of the agrarian writers of the 1930s, whose European poesy belies their dirt-road political beliefs. Showing how the tensions in the narratives mirrored tensions in the author and in his society, Heart in Conflict reveals William Faulkner as he struggled with his inheritance both as a southerner and as a southern writer.
Author: Marc-William Palen Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691199329 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 328
Book Description
"A new economic history which uncovers the forgotten left-wing, anti-imperial, pacifist origins of economic cosmopolitanism and free trade from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The post-1945 international free-trade regime was established to foster a more integrated, prosperous, and peaceful world. As US Secretary of State Cordell Hull (1933-1944), "Father of the United Nations" and one of the regime's principal architects, explained in his memoirs, "unhampered trade dovetailed with peace; high tariffs, trade barriers, and unfair economic competition, with war." Remarkably, this same economic order is now under assault from the country most involved in its creation: the United States. A global economic nationalist resurgence - heralded by Donald Trump's "America First" protectionism and resultant trade wars with the USA's closest allies and trading partners - now looks to transform over seventy years of regional and global market integration into an illiberal economic order resembling that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Economic cosmopolitan critics of today's retreat from free trade have offered dire warnings that doing so would be catastrophic for global consumers and an existential threat to regional and world peace. But under what circumstances did this ideological marriage of free trade, prosperity, and peace arise? Who were its main adherents? How did this same free-trade ideology succeed in becoming the new economic orthodoxy following the Second World War? And how might the successes and failures of this earlier struggle to reform the economic order inform today's globalization crisis? In Pax Economica, economic historian Marc-William Palen finds answers amid a century of transnational peace and anti-imperial activism that stretched from Britain's unilateral adoption of free trade in 1846 to the founding of the US-led liberal trading system that arose immediately after the Second World War. Over five thematic chapters, considering the period from different perspectives, and utilising archival research conducted in Europe, North America, and Australia, Palen shows that this politico-ideological struggle to create a more prosperous and peaceful world through free trade pitted economic cosmopolitans against economic nationalists. Cosmopolitans sought to counter the industrialising world's embrace of economic nationalism because they believed - much like today's critics of Trump's tariffs and Brexit - that economic nationalism laid the groundwork for trade wars, high prices for consumers, and geopolitical conflict; while free trade created market interdependence, prosperity, social justice, and a more peaceful world. Pax Economica argues that this cosmopolitan fight for free trade laid foundations for a century of anti-imperial and peace activism across the globe - and paved the way for today's global trade regime now under siege"--
Author: Stanley D. M. Carpenter
Author: Phillip Thomas Tucker
Author: Huw J. Davies
Author: Phillip Thomas Tucker
Author: John Ferling
Author: James R. Mc Intyre
Author: Stephen M. Feldman
Author: The Museum of the American Revolution The Museum of the American Revolution
Author: Michael Grimwood
Author: Marc-William Palen