Site Of Battle Research Articles

The Storm Keeper’s Island by Catherine Doyle

Reviewed by: The Storm Keeper’s Island by Catherine Doyle Fiona Hartley-Kroeger Doyle, Catherine The Storm Keeper’s Island. Bloomsbury, 2019 [304p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-68119-959-7 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-54760-011-3 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 4-6 In this British import by Irish writer Doyle, eleven-year-old Fionn Boyle and his bratty older sister, Tara, arrive on the island of Arranmore to spend the summer with their grandfather. Their grandfather reveals to Fionn the secret of Arranmore: it was the site of a long-ago battle between the good mage Dagda and the evil enchantress Morrigan, and while Dagda’s magic lives on in each generation’s Storm Keeper, Morrigan lies buried somewhere beneath the island, the prospect of her rising again a constant threat. Fionn’s grandfather, the present Storm Keeper, shows him how to use the magical candles he makes to travel back through “layers” of the island’s history even as Grandad is growing weaker and increasingly forgetful. The suspense and action scenes are less compelling than the quieter moments between Fionn and his grandfather, but Doyle thoughtfully explores Fionn’s struggles with courage and cowardice, renders palpable his longing for a connection with the father he never knew, and peppers the pages with plentiful, entertaining sibling bickering. The engaging construction of magical time travel and Doyle’s beautifully descriptive prose will enchant those looking for an atmospheric magical adventure. Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Work organization of evacuation hospitals in Saratov during the Battle of Stalingrad

The work organization of evacuation hospitals in Saratov during the Stalingrad battle is analyzed. A brief description of the medical issues of the Stalingrad strategic defensive operation is given. The factors that determined the evacuation of a significant number of wounded and sick Red Army soldiers to the medical facilities of the Local evacuation point-45 are indicated. Statistical data are provided on the number of people taken to treatment and sent to other rear hospitals who suffered from the site of the crucial battle of the Great Patriotic and World War II. The importance of using railway, water and motor vehicles for the evacuation of the wounded and sick was noted. The issues of the organization of sanitary and hygienic and antiepidemic work in Saratov and the region in the period of approaching the front, high crowding of the local population and arriving refugees, as well as the constant arrival of ambulance transports are considered. The enormous role of the Saratov Medical Institute staff in medical and consulting work in evacuation hospitals was emphasized. Their high professional training, constant search of non-standard ways of solving complex problems arising in the course of daily clinical activity, allowed to achieve high results in the work of medical institutions, to save the lives of a large number of wounded soldiers and commanders of the Red Army. The contribution and main directions of medical and scientific activity of leading specialists of the medical institute in the considered historical period of time are highlighted.

An Apostle in Battle: Paul and Spiritual Warfare in 2 Corinthians 12:1–10

An Apostle in Battle: Paul and Spiritual Warfare in 2 Corinthians 12:1–10

Assessment and Significance of a World War II battle site: recording the USS Emmons using a High-Resolution DEM combining Multibeam Bathymetry and SfM Photogrammetry

Assessment and Significance of a World War II battle site: recording the USS <i>Emmons</i> using a High-Resolution DEM combining Multibeam Bathymetry and SfM Photogrammetry

Soft Hands, Hard Power: Sponging Off the Empire of Leisure (Virgil,Georgics4)

AbstractThis article seeks to jumpstart the politico-historicist scholarship on Virgil'sGeorgicsin the direction of Marxist criticism. I argue that theGeorgicsshould be understood less as a battle site for intra-elite power struggles or civil strife, more as an ideological stomping ground to work out, and dig in, the particular relationships of slavery and imperialism disfiguring the Roman world in 29b.c.e. After a brief analysis of the dynamics oflaborin Books 1–3, I train on a close reading of Book 4, which sees the bees (et al.) as crucial to the new dominant logic of compelling others (whether slaves or provincial subjects) to produce and give up the fruits of their labour — all for the leisured enjoyment of the upper crust.

Armed Ambiguity: Women Warriors in German Literature and Culture in the Age of Goethe by Julie Koser

Reviewed by: Armed Ambiguity: Women Warriors in German Literature and Culture in the Age of Goethe by Julie Koser Elisabeth Krimmer Armed Ambiguity: Women Warriors in German Literature and Culture in the Age of Goethe. By Julie Koser. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. Pp. x + 250. Paper $34.95. ISBN 978-0810132344. Julie Koser’s Armed Ambiguity: Women Warriors in German Literature and Culture in the Age of Goethe presents a comprehensive and thoroughly researched study of the figure of the woman warrior around 1800. As Koser demonstrates, women warriors were popular characters in contemporary fiction who often served to illustrate female resistance and agency. After all, women warriors cannot but transgress against traditional gender norms: they are frequently violent, they participate in combat, or, at the very least, leave the domestic realm and venture into the public sphere. And yet, as Koser points out, the figure of the woman warrior does not necessarily embody emancipatory messages, but rather functions as the site of symbolic battles. Women warriors may be condemned and reviled as criminals and villains, but they may also be admired as self-sacrificing patriots and thus fulfill a function in the discursive formation of national identity. Koser argues convincingly that the many representations of female warriors do not adhere to any one particular ideology. Rather, they operate at the intersection of the material and the discursive and can be appropriated for competing political agendas. In the late eighteenth century, the German preoccupation with the figure of the woman warrior was clearly influenced by contemporary reports from neighboring France that spoke of bloodthirsty female “hyenas” and of women’s efforts to secure the right to bear arms and defend the fatherland. Thus, Koser appropriately begins her study with a discussion of the German reception of reports about women’s roles in the French Revolution. Specifically, chapter 1 focuses on German newspapers and journals, including the Haude und Spenersche Zeitung and the Vossische Zeitung, as well as Engelbert Oelsner’s travel reports in Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz’s Minerva. Koser considers these newspaper articles “effective vehicles for mythmaking” (23). She observes that the press tended to depict not individuals, but groups of women who were said to be out of control and unable to curb their vile drives. Conversely, the victims of female bloodlust were said to be male, and the descriptions of violent incidents were often marked by erotic undertones. Koser further notes [End Page 162] that the crazed woman warrior is frequently juxtaposed to the patriotic lady whose contribution to the cause consists in fundraising efforts and in her willingness to consume German goods. Chapter 2 focuses on representations of Charlotte Corday, who assassinated Jean-Paul Marat in 1793. Koser discusses two German dramas, Johann Heinrich Daniel Zschokke’s Charlotte Corday oder die Rebellion von Calvados (1795) and Engel Christine Westphalen’s Charlotte Corday: Tragödie in fünf Akten mit Chören (1805), both of which recode Corday’s act as patriotic self-sacrifice. While Corday herself conceived of her violent act as tyrannicide, Zschokke suggests that Corday was driven to her deed by male inaction. Both Zschokke and Westphalen invent fictional love interests for Corday and reframe the threat to the republic as a danger to the family, thus attenuating Corday’s transgression against gender codes. Westphalen further defends Corday by overlaying the murder with religious imagery. Koser then analyzes representations of the warrior woman as defender of the domestic sphere in Benedikte Naubert’s historical novels Geschichte der Gräfin Thekla von Thurn oder Scenen aus dem dreißigjährigen Kriege (1788) and Philippe von Geldern: Oder Geschichte Selims, des Sohns Amurat (1793), as well as in Goethe’s Herrmann und Dorothea (1797) and Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801). In all these texts, the female warrior turns her aggression toward an external enemy. Thus, the disorderly woman is reframed as a patriot, and female aggression is yoked to the defense of the initially weakened, patriarchal order of household, king, and country. Moreover, while Naubert’s crossdressers fail to perform masculinity successfully, neither Schiller’s Jungfrau nor Goethe’s Dorothea attempt to pass as male. Koser posits that in spite of all...

Commemoration by Committee: The National Wallace Monument

Commemoration by Committee: The National Wallace Monument Ann Rigney (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. National Wallace Monument, Abbey Craig, Stirling. From Charles Rogers, The Book of Wallace, vol. 1 (1889). The national Wallace Monument, Stirling, is visible from miles around. Built between 1861 and 1867, it takes the form of a medieval tower with an extruded stair turret and a crown spire (fig. 1). Standing on a rocky outcrop called the Abbey Craig, it overlooks the Forth River and the site where the English army was defeated in 1297 by Scottish forces led by William Wallace.1 The imposing building, built in a rather elegant version of the Scottish Baronial style, is itself a further sixty-seven metres high. It has been a popular tourist destination since 1867, and visitors (at least, those not wearing crinolines) have been able to climb the 246 steps to enjoy three superimposed rooms—in the original design, they are the Hall of Arms, the Hall of Heroes, and the Royal Chamber with Wallace’s sword on display—before stepping out onto the viewing platform at the top (MacInnes 36). The panorama that [End Page 1] meets the eye is stunning and confirms the logic of doing battle at such a strategic site on the threshold to the Highlands. Visitors nowadays can still enjoy the view, although presumably their knowledge, if any, of William Wallace has been shaped more by the film Braveheart (1995), starring Mel Gibson, than by Blind Harry’s poem “The Wallace” (c. 1488), Jane Porter’s novel The Scottish Chiefs (1810), or Robert Burns’s lyrics for the song “Scots Wha Hae” (1793), key points of reference for the nineteenth-century public (Crawford 42, 107–21). In its sheer size and ostensible dedication to a single national hero, the Wallace Monument seems to confirm the traditional understanding of nineteenth-century monumentality. Whether it is understood in Friedrich Nietzsche’s sense as the celebration of unquestioned truths and triumphs or in Andreas Huyssen’s sense of “monumental seduction” (Huyssen 30–48), monumentalism has usually been associated with a totalizing attempt to stabilize and unify memory: literally, to petrify it into a reduced form that permanently defines national histories and aspirations in a monolithic way, leaving nothing for the citizen to do but to stand in awe. On closer inspection, however, the National Wallace Monument challenges this standard view of monumentalism and offers a keyhole perspective on public cultures of commemoration. From this perspective, such cultures appear much more dynamic and fluctuating in practice than their colossal material relics now suggest and are much more subject to negotiation and the active participation of enthusiastic citizens on whose mobilization their erection depended. There are layers to this monument not immediately visible to the naked eye. To begin with, the absence of figuration on the monument is telling. While the architectural style clearly signals “Scottishness,” the building has no narrative or figurative elements except for the Wallace coat of arms above the entrance door and a single niche containing a statue of Wallace brandishing a sword (although part of John Thomas Rochead’s original design, this statue was only added in 1887 and, at four metres high, appears small relative to the building as a whole). Invisible to the eye but virtually present because knowable from other sources is an alternative design for the national tribute to Wallace: the monument that might have been built but was not. This was the design produced by J. Noël Paton in1859, consisting of a rampant Scottish lion standing triumphantly over the monster it was in the process of slaying. Although this more belligerent composition had been the initial winner of the architectural competition for the planned Wallace monument, it was subsequently rejected as being overtly anti-English rather than simply “national” (Coleman 55–56) and was replaced by the tower we see today. The monument’s location might also have been different. Unlike most national monuments in the nineteenth century, the Wallace Tower has a rural rather than an urban setting. The choice for Stirling was the outcome of a compromise. To be sure, the proximity to the battle site as...

Soft power and dark heritage: multiple potentialities

While positively connoted tangible cultural heritage is widely recognized as an asset to states in their exercise of soft power, the value of sites of ‘dark heritage’ in the context of soft power strategies has not yet been fully explored. This article offers a theoretical framework for the analysis of the multiple soft power potentialities inherent in the management and presentation of sites of past violence and atrocity, demonstrating how the value of these sites can be developed in terms of place branding, cultural diplomacy and state-level diplomacy. The relationship between dark heritage, soft power and the search for ‘ontological security’ is also explored, highlighting how difficult pasts can be mobilized in order to frame positive contemporary roles for states in the international system. Drawing on this theoretical framework, the article offers an analysis of the case of the Soča valley in Slovenia and the presentation of the site of the First World War battle of Kobarid in a dedicated museum. Through this case study, the article underlines the particular role of dark heritage for the national self-projection of a new and small state in the context of European integration.

0161 Die Totenburgen von Tobruk und El Alamein – strategische Memorialarchitektur für die Bundesrepublik

The two German memorials in Tobruk, Libya (1954-1955) and in El Alamein, Egypt (1956-1959) were deliberately built close to sites of decisive Second World War battles. At both memorials, commemoration is cultivated in a predominantly de-individualized manner, and the historical-political meaningfulness as well as the fort-like, hermetical design of the structures directly reference concepts of commemoration prevalent during the Third Reich. Analogous to these concepts, the memorials refer back to the Hohenstaufen castles and forts in southern Italy and Sicily, and, thus, to the Holy Roman Empire’s most persistent period of territorial expansion. Robert Tischler, the architect responsible for both of the German War Graves Commission’s monuments in North Africa, had already constructed similar memorials during the National Socialist period. He was able to carry such projects over to the post-war period without further scrutiny. This illustrates once again the oppressive personnel and mental consistencies which continued beyond 1945.

The Guidebook and the Medicine Pole: Staging Memory at a Nineteenth Century Battle Site in the American West

Visitors to the Lava Beds National Monument discover a site where the National Park Service has to orchestrate features of geological, historical, and environmental interest. This article examines the way in which it presents one of these features, «Captain Jack’s Stronghold», the site of a confrontation between the U.S. army and a small band of Modoc Indians that took place in 1872-73. In following the self-guided tour, visitors engage in a quasi-theatrical performance that encourages them to «emplace» themselves in the present through a commemorative act that reconstructs the past in order to conciliate conflicts in the contemporary community and to define the nation in the present. This article reflects on the power of landscape to create a sense of history and to foster a sense of place. The former battleground is the site of an inevitably disputed process of collective emplacement.

Black Towns and the Civil War: Touring Battles of Race, Nation, and Place

This article focuses on the inclusion of a Civil War battle site, Honey Springs, in two bus tours of Oklahoma’s historic Black towns. I explore why tours devoted to Black communities visit the site of a historic military event, and how each tour does so differently. Looking at a conventional state-sponsored tour narrative of the battle site and an alternative tour narrative, I argue that the two are distinct in how they position the relationship of blackness to America. The conventional narrative focuses on the details of the battle, placing Black participation and relevance to the war story on the sidelines. Ultimately, I argue that the two tours demonstrate public struggles over the place of blackness in the nation’s history.

Rivers of Risk and Redemption in Gregory of Tours’ Writings

Rivers of Risk and Redemption in Gregory of Tours’ Writings

German Colonial Missionaries and the Majimaji Memorials in Southern Tanzania

This article considers the role of missionaries in constructing memorials to the Majimaji sites at Mikukuyumbu, Nyangao, and Maposeni in southern Tanzania. The Majimaji war is one of the most important events in the history of Tanzania as the first attempt for freedom from colonial domination. Although the government of Tanzania constructed the National Majimaji Museum, it has failed to commemorate all battle sites with built memorials. On the other hand, missionaries have constructed memorials in all the areas where bishops, priests, and nuns were killed during the Majimaji war. Missionary memorials have been used by Southern Tanzanians—missionaries, Christians, and non-Christians. Thus, the analyses of the missionary Majimaji memorials and the use of the memorials by both missionaries and the people of southern Tanzania provides a picture of how battle sites are memorialized by different agents.

“A Revolution in the Republic of Letters”: The News from Waterloo and the Post-Waterloo Media State

BRECHT DE GROOTE “A Revolution in the Republic ofLetters”: The News from Waterloo and the Post-Waterloo Media State Bruxelles, ce blessed Lundi, June 26, 1815. Why have I not a Balloon to be the first to tell you this enchanting news! Or, rather, Wings to fly to you with it myself! Buonaparte has yielded to Lord Wellington. The particulars—how, which way, &c.— are told too variously . . . but the fact seems undoubted:—seems, I am compelled to say, for nothing official has been here printed. The sleepiness of this quiet and good, but most drowsy and humdrum people, exceeds belief, especially when I consider que les Francs et les Beiges came from one parent stock, i.e. the Germains. Oh mon ami! will not peace now revisit us? . . . Oh for an English Gazette! The revolution in the system of traveling . . . and in the whole apparatus, means, machinery, and dependencies of that system—a revolution begun, carried through, and perfected within the period of my own personal experience—merits a word or two of illustration in the most cursory memoirs that profess any attention at all to the shifting scenery of the age and the principles ofmotion at work, whether manifested in great ef­ fects or little. And these particular effects, though little, when re­ garded in their separate details, are not little in their final amount. On the contrary, I have always maintained that in a representa­ tive government . . . there is a result waiting on the final im1 . Frances Burney d’Arblay, “Madame d’Arblay to General d’Arblay,” in Diary and Letters ofMadame d’Arblay, 1778-1840, ed. Charlotte Barrett (London: Macmillan, 1905), 6:261—62. Hereafter abbreviated as “Letter to d’Arblay” in the text. SiR, 56 (Fall 2017) 399 400 BRECHT l)E GROOTE provements of the arts of traveling, and of transmitting intelli­ gence with velocity.' T his article examines the ways in which the memory of Waterloo was shaped by the emergent media state, constructed in the wake of the French Revolution to curb the threat ofrebellion through careful man­ agement of the channels of communication. I specifically argue that Waterloo opened up public attempts at grappling with the media state be­ cause, while the uniquely effective dissemination of the news from the bat­ tle came to serve as a model for the governmental organization of mass communication and its considerable ideological benefits, its historical use as a focus for official propaganda was relatively limited. Even “as late as 1850,” Linda Colley observes, “no outdoor state monument had been completed ... to the duke of Wellington and the battle of Waterloo.”3 This dearth of governmental interest, born of a desire to assert continuity across the disturbing interlude of revolution and war, contrasts sharply with widespread popular interest in Waterloo. As Neil Ramsey argues, Britain “saw a range of commemorative efforts in the post-war years that were dis­ connected from state sponsorship.”4 At one end of this wide spectrum of memorial acts, commemoration involved literal returns to the site ofbattle, which was thereby converted into a physical lieu de memoire. The first traces ofthis practice emerge in the immediate aftermath of the battle. Writing to her mother from Brussels, Caroline Lamb reports that British citizens stranded in the city in June of 1815 resort for their “amusement” to assem­ bling “large parties & gofing] to the field of Battle.”5 While such im­ promptu visits developed into a fad for battlefield tourism/’ tourists soon found themselves acutely dissatisfied. Lamb remarks that the only interest­ ing event during her walks on the field occurred when one of her party “stuck her parasol . . . into a skull” (172). Similarly, in a journal entry dated April 4, 1822, Mary Berry dismisses the site as lackluster, complaining that “[t]he Haye Sainte ... is all repaired. . . . The tomb of Gordon and that of the Hanoverian officers is nothing remarkable. ... La Belle Alliance [is] a miserable little beer-house.” What is at issue in these moments of petulant disparagement is not the status of Waterloo, which Berry does not hesitate 2. Thomas De Quincey, “Traveling in England Thirty Years Ago,” Tail’s Edinburgh Mag­ azine (September 1824): 797. Hereafter abbreviated as “Traveling...

A “Most Disastrous” Affair: The Battle of Hungry Hill, Historical Memory, and the Rogue River War

The Battle of Hungry Hill, fought on October 31 and November 1, 1855, ended in a “humiliating defeat for a fragile coalition of U.S. Army dragoons and several companies of citizen volunteers” against the Takelma. In this research article, Mark Tveskov describes how Euro-American accounts of the battle “overlooked the American defeat,” “veterans of the battle minimized the defeat and desertion in their memoirs, sometimes mythologizing the battle to the point of turning it into a victory,” and “the battle was lost to the larger historical narrative of the American West.” In September 2012, a team of archaeologists and scholars discovered the battle site, and their research points to a history that is sometimes at odds with long-standing portrayals of the Battle of Hungry Hill.

Archeological Confirmation of the Site of the Battle of Medina: A Research Note

Archeological Confirmation of the Site of the Battle of Medina: A Research Note Robert P. Marshall (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Frontispiece: Map showing August, 1813 locations of republican and royalist in the encinal de Medina and vicinity of Bexar and Atascosa Counties, Texas. [End Page 56] The August 18, 1813, Battle of Medina was initiated by a failed ambush attempt by the Republican Army of the North, which was followed by a pursuit of retreating Spanish royalist cavalry through four miles of the very sandy encinal de Medina (oak forest of Medina). Then, the republicans were surprised to come upon a line of temporary defensive breastworks protecting six hundred soldiers of a royalist infantry battalion only recently arrived from Spain, who stood their ground like seasoned veterans. The royalists were well fortified and prepared for battle with nine cannons, including some twelve-pounders. About one thousand republican infantry were caught in a partial enfilade by oblique royalist cannon fire from both flanks. A standing republican infantryman was killed about every six seconds during more than an hour of very close range combat in front of the royalist breastworks. The killing field during the Battle of Medina was there, and stretched from that spot along the road toward San Antonio de Béxar in the rout that followed. (Frontispiece) The earliest recorded archeological evidence corroborating the location of the Medina battleground was in the 1815 diary of Juan Pedro Walker.2 During his travel from Béxar to Laredo, Walker observed skeletal remains of rebel dead from the “Campo de la Batalla de Medina” along the camino que cortaba route of a San Antonio de Béxar to Laredo Road, located west of Gallinas Creek, for a distance of about a league (about [End Page 57] 2 ½ miles) beginning a short distance north of the present-day Bexar/Atascosa County line. The southern terminus of the observed skeletal remains marked the location of the Medina battleground. The other observations of skeletal remains were mostly from those walking wounded who were killed by royalist cavalry as republicans attempted to flee along the road toward San Antonio de Béxar. Analyses of available archival records and maps have documented the site of the August 18, 1813, Battle of Medina to be twenty-two miles south of San Antonio astride Old Pleasanton Road, the successor to the camino que cortaba route of the Béxar to Laredo Road, between present-day Bruce Road and the railroad overpass in northern Atascosa County.3 (Figure 1) The purpose of this research note is to document the archeological evidence confirming that Medina battle site. The absolute archeological requirement for any location claimed to be the site of the Battle of Medina is evidence on the site of the mass burial in 1822 by Mexican Texas Governor José Félix Trespalacios of the skeletal remains of the hundreds of republican dead that had been left unburied on the battleground for nine years. The skeletal remains were buried with military honors near a large oak tree on the battleground, but the skulls were taken to a spot near the Medina River and buried under a pecan tree.4 José Antonio Navarro, a signer of the 1836 Texas Declaration of Independence from Mexico, distinctly remembered seeing a wooden sign on an oak tree on the Medina battleground marking the site of burial of the republican dead. Almost certainly, the site of the mass burial in 1822 would have been very central to the location on the battleground of the skeletal remains. Historian John Henry Brown said that even as late as 1843 he had observed fragments of bones still lying about on the Medina battleground.5 Expert archeological opinion is that human bones buried in the battleground’s very sandy subsoil would not have survived intact for two centuries.6 Over that period of time the lightly acidic and oxygenated ground-water moving through the burial would have caused the bones to be completely dissolved. During dryer weather periods the calcium-enriched water within the burial would have moved toward the surface by capillary [End Page 58] attraction as water evaporated...

A Spatiotemporal Approach to Historical Understanding through Development of Field - Trip Courses - Around the Sea - Battle Sites of the Admiral Lee Sunsin -

A Spatiotemporal Approach to Historical Understanding through Development of Field - Trip Courses - Around the Sea - Battle Sites of the Admiral Lee Sunsin -

Soviet Youth on the March: The All-Union Tours of Military Glory, 1965–87

Between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s tens of millions of young people took part in the Communist Youth League’s ‘All-Union Tours around Sites of Military Glory’, visiting former battle sites, walking old partisan trails, uncovering soldiers’ remains, and meeting with war veterans. This was a prominent facet of the ‘cult’ that the Soviet regime built around the Second World War during the Brezhnev era, and it was also a crucial feature of work aimed at ensuring young people grew up to be good communists and loyal Soviet citizens. Based upon archival research conducted in several former Soviet republics and Russian regions, this article demonstrates that these tours and the wider war cult which they formed a part of were about much more than simply creating a new legitimizing myth for a system running out of ideological energy. They helped fulfil vital state tasks, like preparing youth for military conscription and caring for veterans, they served as a means of shaping young people’s outlook on their country and the world, and they helped knit together the social fabric of the country.

Carbonate rocks and American Civil War infantry tactics

The most studied battleground from the American Civil War, from a geological perspective, is the rolling terrain surrounding Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Here, the mixture of harder diabase and softer sedimentary rocks produced famous geomorphic features such as Cemetery Hill and Little Round Top that provided strong defensive positions for the Union Army. Another even more common type of rock—carbonates—provided similarly formidable defensive positions at numerous other battlefields in both the eastern and western theaters of conflict. Limestones and dolostones shaped the terrain of multiple important battle sites, including Antietam, Stones River, Chickamauga, Franklin, Nashville, and Monocacy, and these rock types proved consequential with respect to the tactics employed by both Union and Confederate commanders. On many battlefields, outcropping limestone proved beneficial for attacking troops; differential weathering within carbonate formations produced rolling terrain that limited the range and effectiveness of both artillery and small arms (e.g., “Sunken Road” at Antietam). Thin regoliths above limestone also prevented tillage, and the resulting forests provided concealment and cover for advancing troops (e.g., Stones River). From a defensive perspective, on a larger geographic scale, carbonates provided natural high ground from chert-enriched limestones and dolostones (e.g., Missionary Ridge, Chickamauga, Franklin, and Nashville). On a smaller scale, erosion of these same rocks produced karrens that provided natural rock-lined trenches for defending troops (e.g., “Slaughter Pen” at Stones River). Analysis of casualty figures (killed and wounded only) indicates similar losses (∼15% of troops engaged) whether soldiers were attacking across carbonate rock, non-carbonate rock, or unconsolidated sediments. Soldiers defending ground underlain by limestones and dolostones had a slightly higher casualty rate (14%) than those defending terrain above non-carbonate rocks or unconsolidated sediments (12%). This suggests, in a limited manner, that the local smaller-scale defensive advantages provided by limestone, such as karrens, were not as important as the regional-scale advantages for attacking troops, including rolling terrain or forest cover.

Locating the Site of the Battle of Medina: A Research Note

Locating the Site of the Battle of Medina:A Research Note Robert P. Marshall (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution A detail of the area near San Antonio de Béxar (visible in upper right) from Stephen F. Austin’s Mapa Geografico de la Provincia de Texas. Adapted from Eugene C. Barker, The Life of Stephen F Austin (reprint; Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1949). [End Page 350] Students of Texas history generally know of the climactic battle between the Republican Army of the North, the military arm of the 1812–1813 Gutiérrez-Magee filibustering expedition, and Spanish royalists in the August 18, 1813, Battle of Medina.1 However, the exact location of the Medina battleground, site of the bloodiest battle ever fought in Texas and one that ended the short life of the first Republic of Texas, has long been forgotten. The purpose of this research note is to reveal that by critical analyses of known archival records the battle site can be located. The earliest published indication of the location of the Medina battleground was on Stephen F. Austin’s 1822 map of Texas.2 Austin marked the site of the Medina battle by the words “Toledo Defeated” on a road that ran between San Antonio de Béxar and Laredo and close to that road’s junction with the Lower Presidio Road, also known as the Camino Real (Frontispiece). The Lower Presidio Road was an early route from San Antonio de Béxar to the Presidio de San Juan Bautista near the Rio Grande. Austin’s 1830 map of Texas marked the site with the words “Genl Toledo Defeated 1813” and a crossed-sabers symbol about midway between the Medina and Atascosa Rivers astride the road that ran toward Laredo (Figure 1). The battle site indicated by Austin on the 1830 map [End Page 351] was at approximately the same location he marked on his 1822 map, but the Lower Presidio Road is not shown on the 1830 map. The Laredo Road shown on both maps was first suggested in 1767 archival records that indicate the existence of a trail between the Lower Presidio Road and the road between San Antonio de Béxar and Laredo. That connecting path was referred to by royalist General Joaquín de Arredondo in his Medina campaign report3 as the “camino que cortaba”4 (road that connects). Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Map of Béxar and vicinity from Stephen F. Austin’s 1830 map of Texas. [End Page 352] The junction of the Lower Presidio Road and the camino que cortaba was shown on an 1807 Spanish map,5 the 1822 and 18286 Stephen F. Austin maps of Texas, and the 1867 map of Texas by Charles Pressler7 (Figure 2), and was exactly located by the 1915 Zivley survey, (Figure 3) which was commissioned by the state of Texas.8 By the Mexican Republic period, the camino que cortaba route of the San Antonio de Béxar to Laredo Road would become the most commonly traveled route and was generally called the Laredo Road. Although a study of the Stephen F. Austin maps of Texas certainly indicates that he knew that the Battle of Medina took place astride the camino que cortaba route of the San Antonio de Béxar to Laredo Road, the exact geographic location of the Medina battleground on that road cannot be determined solely by the Austin maps. However, analyses of two archival records not previously noted by historians indicate the location on that road of the long-forgotten Medina battleground.9 A published 1828 sketch map of San Antonio de Béxar and vicinity10 (Figure 4), probably by Jean Louis Berlandier,11 shows the route taken by the Mexican Comisión de Límites (Boundary Commission)12 under the command of Gen. Manuel de Mier y Terán, which included Berlandier as naturalist, went passed the Medina battleground during its travel from the Rancherías/La Loma de San Cristobal (the hill of St. Christopher) area en route to their near Medina River campsite on February 29, 1828.13 Published 1828 diaries...