Day Of Battle Research Articles

Classification features of return losses of troop personnel: the problem of stress-associated mental disorders in modern military conflicts and emergencies

This study investigates the classification features of return losses of the personnel of the troops, specifically focusing on psychiatric profile losses and stress-associated mental disorders in the context of modern military conflicts and emergencies of various natures. The term return losses refers to individuals who have regained their combat and work capacity after a temporary loss during military conflicts and are deemed physically fit to resume their functional duties. Additionally, temporarily lost combat and working capacity refers to individuals unable to perform their functional duties for a short period, typically ranging from several minutes to 24 hours. This category includes individuals with stress-associated mental disorders. The research finds that at least 20% of victims in modern military conflicts and emergencies exhibit signs of mental maladaptation within the first day of battle or during the elimination of the medical and sanitary consequences. To address the classification of personnel losses in psychiatric and stress-related cases, as well as the inconsistency in existing terminology, a proposed classification system based on the ability to return to service is presented. Furthermore, new principles have been established to determine the return losses of military personnel, facilitating the provision of adequate and timely assistance for individuals affected by stress-associated mental disorders. The article also outlines medical and psychological correction measures at various levels and elements of first aid for combat stress-induced maladaptive phenomena. Additionally, the study recommends future research on developing a methodology to assess the size and structure of contingents consisting of individuals who temporarily lose their combat and working capacity due to modern enemy weapons during combat operations, as well as in diverse emergency situations.

600 days of Battle

According to Silva (2020b), among 108 well–evaluated countries, NZ was the eighth best nation during 180 days of battle against Covid-19, and one year after that publication, on 29th October, 2021, about 5,004,0026 lives were officially lost by Covid–19, while NZ only reported 28 deaths (WORLDOMETERS, 2021). To complement Gomes da Silva (2020) and Silva (2020a; 2020b; 2021a; 2021b) researches, the main aim of this article is to investigate the NZ performance and management practices used to save lives against Covid-19. It uses an online questionnaire with descriptive, bibliographic and documentary approaches to identify management practices, including cultural practices and Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) adopted during the pandemic. The main performance is found by using the Fatality Total Index and Resilience Index to compare NZ's performance with 43 countries during 600 days of battle. As a result: 1) among the 44 countries, NZ was the most resilient and the second (FTI600=0.0165) best-best performer, after China (0.0066); 2) among 131 respondents living in NZ, 34.35% don´t believe that cultural practices are decisive for the low rate of Covid–19 death, while 65.65% believe in that. From those that believe, the most decisive cultural practices were wash hands, not hug in public, and not shake hands; 3) for 131 respondents, the ten main policy measures adopted by the National Government that saved lives against the virus are international travel control, public event cancellations, restriction on internal movement, public information campaigns, schools closures, support the expansion of testing system, wage subsidies for workers, workplace closures, increase the medical and personal equipment capacity, and effective public-private collaboration. At the final, lessons are provided from 360 policies, measures, programs, projects, acts/regulations, innovative products/services identified, with the majority led by the Public Sector (66.7%), followed by Corporations (11.4%), Universities (8.9%), Others (8.3%), and Startups (4.7%).

Jews in the Battle for Crimea, 1941–1944

On July 4, 1942, the Soviet people heard the sad news that, after 250 days of battle, Sevastopol, “the city of Russian glory,” had fallen. Twenty-two months later, Sevastopol was liberated by the 51st Army of the 4th Ukrainian Front. The army’s commander was Lieutenant General Iakov Kreizer, Hero of the Soviet Union and a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Thousands of Jews, soldiers of the Red Army, took part in the battle for Crimea in 1941–1944. The staff of the Commission on the History of the Great Patriotic War of the USSR Academy of Sciences interviewed some of them. These interviews are interesting not only in revealing how the Jews fought, but also in illuminating their prewar life, family background, and careers in the army. They are a unique source not only for military, but also for social history, affording insights into the phenomenon of Soviet Jewry.

The Imprint of the War in Ford Madox Ford’s Critical Writings

Ford Madox Ford said of the year 1914 that it “seem[ed] to be cut in half” by the First World War (“Literary Portraits – LXIX”, 15). This phrase, one may argue, also largely applies to Ford’s personal timeline. Both his private life and his literary career were profoundly disrupted by the global conflict. In the early months of the First World War, Ford wrote prolifically about the future of literature and on a broader scope, of civilisation and human psychology; in his “Literary Portraits” that were published in Outlook, he showed remarkable prescience when it came to the consequences that the war would bear on the arts and on what he termed “the mind”. Yet when one examines the chronology of Ford’s non-fictional writing, and indeed of his literary work, one can sense a sharp dividing line that coincides with the moment when Ford enrolled in the British army in 1915, and was no longer a spectator from afar, but a direct witness of the unprecedented mass killing that was taking place on the front. His pre-war assertions gave way to questions; and as was the case with many other writers who took directly part in the hostilities, a decade elapsed before Ford succeeded in rendering his war experience in a novelistic form, through the Parade’s End tetralogy. This paper aims to examine Ford’s critical writing during the First World War, and to analyse the way in which he attempted to come to terms with the representational aporia that was triggered by his first-hand experience of battle. It focuses on Ford’s “Literary Portraits”; the pair of essays “A Day of Battle”, written in the Ypres Salient; “War and the Mind”, composed shortly after Ford’s return from the front; and the dedicatory letters to No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up—, and Last Post. These allow us to explore how the impressionist technique which Ford started to theorise before the war, came to be renewed and refined in his post-war writing, trying as it does to render the inexpressible experience of the war.

Lützen, by Peter H. Wilson

In this study, Peter Wilson explores the battle of Lützen, fought between the Swedish army under Gustavus Adolphus and the imperial army led by Albrecht von Wallenstein on the 6/16 November 1632. Part of OUP’s ‘Great Battles’ series, Wilson’s book is not confined to the battle itself. Lützen is carefully placed in the context of the Thirty Years War, and a substantial part of the text is devoted to the political and cultural legacy of the battle. Let it be said at once that the author seems equally interested in all aspects of his study, and that his style is admirably clear and analytic. The last quality is essential not least in his endeavours to elucidate the course of events on the day of battle, obscured as they are not only by fragmented and conflicting reports from eye-witnesses but also by centuries of propaganda and biased historians. His avowed purpose is to ‘go some way towards a more reflective and nuanced interpretation of the battle and its significance’ (p. 179). Wilson has undoubtedly done that—and more. Not least impressive is his contextualisation, skilfully analysing the Thirty Years’ War and the battle of Lützen in the long-term perspective of the struggle for power over and within the Holy Roman Empire.

The Comfort of Melancholy: Understanding the Experience of Absence at American Memorials

There's comfort in melancholyWhen there's no need to explainIt's just as natural as the weatherIn this moody sky today....Well I looked at the granite markersThose tributes to finality to eternityAnd then I looked at myself hereChicken scratching for my immortalityJoni Mitchell, Hejira, 1976The battle of Gettysburg and the 9/11 terror attacks, 150 years apart, produced memorials that share a common theme: each expresses absence as its memorial theme. The dead cannot be seen, even in sculptural form: they have vanished into abstraction. At Gettysburg, the dead and numbered in the thousands. Survivors saw their colleagues vaporized (Faust 128). The damage and poisonous stench after the three days of battle in 1863 created a discourse about death of the magnitude that circulated in the aftermath of 9/ 11. The title of the winning design for the 9/11 memorial-''Reflecting Absence-made explicit a theme that has implicitly made its way into public spaces of mourning in America since Gettysburg's response to its tragedy provided the visual vocabulary of absence: relying on combinations of earth, stone, water, and names, rejecting the figurai, they establish a memorial vernacular of the missing. Gettysburg, the 9/11 Memorial, and two others that express this visual trope-the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial-are all among America's most prominent memorial sites, and all evoke the comfort of melancholy.From Gettysburg to 9/11 : The Visual Language of Absence at American MemorialsGettysburg's Civil War burials were the result of America's first experience with mass mourning. The 9/11 Memorial shares with Gettysburg features that in 1863 were unprecedented: a shared community of mourners, still reeling from the enormity of the event, produced a message of equality and absence combined (Faust 69, 100-01; Haas 49; Wills 29-30). At Gettysburg's National Soldiers' Cemetery, the flat markers are identical in shape and typeface, and all are embedded in the soil. Unknown appears interspersed with names and ranks. The dead are indistinguishable from one another, the absent equally absent. Conveying the message of missing in turn relies on abstraction: its lines are rectilinear and nonfigural, inviting looking inward or imagining beyond. Precluding hero worship, Gettysburg relies on evenly spaced semicircles of headstones to convey its message. The first American memorial commemorating violent mass deaths evokes absence through abstraction.This same visual message is found at America's memorials to imponderable mass tragedies that occurred after Gettysburg: the attack on Pearl Harbor, represented by the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial; the Vietnam Veterans Memorial; and the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum. The U.S.S. Arizona visitors' center is a simple rectangular box built on the waters above the sunken ship Rising bubbles from the ship's leaking oil tanks, visible in an open well inside, and the round armament that once housed one of the ship's turrets are the only surface signs of the graveyard of the ship's rusting hulk below. The memorial structure does not touch the ship (Delgado 77). The bodies of the dead remain out of sight and out of reach. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial lists the names of the dead in order of their deaths on a planished wall embedded in soil. From the northwest approach, the nestled wall is invisible. The first memorial to mark a long war, rather than a single event, with the message of absence, the wall of names represents a variation on Gettysburg's heritage: the community marked the tragedy both of the deaths and of their political ambiguity (Haas 16).Other memorials to the lengthy process of war and their dead do not speak the language of absence. Memorials to the dead of World War II and the Korean War are exemplars of figurai presence, that to the Korean War Memorial literally, and that to World War II implicitly. …

“Truthful as the Record of Heaven”: The Battle of Antietam and the Birth of Photojournalism

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Civil War was a little more than a year old first days of September 1862, and Confederate general Robert E. Lee knew South could not win a prolonged struggle against manpower and industrial might of Union. He hoped for a decisive victory that would lift South's spirits, weaken North's will to fight, and bring European recognition of Confederacy--and, with that recognition, a halt to war. Lee planned to invade Maryland, strike Pennsylvania, and ultimately move on Washington, D.C. Union commander George McClellan marched his army across Potomac from Washington to meet Lee's challenge. The two armies arrived on either side of Antietam Creek northern Maryland on afternoon of September 15. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia numbered about 40,000 men. McClellan's Army of Potomac totaled more than twice that number, about 87,000. A skirmish occurred on afternoon of September 16, but it was a prelude to climactic battle, which commenced at dawn on September 17,1862. (1) More than 6,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died that day farm fields outside Sharpsburg, making it single bloodiest day American military history. More soldiers died that day than died combat all other wars fought by America nineteenth century combined: War of 1812, Mexican-American War, Spanish-American War, and Indian wars. Beyond statistics was indescribable carnage. Words are inadequate to portray scene, wrote one soldier. Another, charge of a burial party, described dead in every state of mutilation, sans arms, sans legs, heads, and intestines, and greater number than on any field we have seen before. It was said that a person could walk a mile or more atop bodies without touching ground. (2) An estimated 5,000 people watched fighting from a hill a safe distance away. Edwin Forbes of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper reported that battle took place on open ground and was fully visible from hillside, which was black with spectators. No battle of war, I think, was witnessed by so many people, he reported. It is possible photographers Alexander Gardner and James F. Gibson were among them. The two men, employees of Mathew Brady, had been following Union army for about two weeks, primarily photographing soldiers their camps. When exactly they arrived at Antietam is uncertain, but they were on field with their equipment day after battle; no other American battlefield had been photographed so soon after fighting. The pair exposed seventy glass negatives within five days of battle. Their images include landmarks of field, hastily dug graves, and corpses of horses and men. A union surgeon described bodies stretched along, one straight line, ready for interment, at least a thousand blackened bloated corpses with blood and gas protruding from every orifice, and maggots holding high carnival over their heads. (3) Gardner and Gibson's photographs were first of dead soldiers on American soil. They would be displayed Brady's New York studio a few weeks later, presenting public with a previously unseen, shocking aspect of war. That two men had managed to take photographs at all under conditions was a technological and psychological feat. But it is not technical expertise that is ultimately Gardner's accomplishment, wrote his biographer Mark Katz. [R]ather it is extending power of photographic image affecting public awareness. The photographic coverage of Civil War by Gardner and others sent authentic images of horrors of battlefield directly to public for first time. This, Katz contended, was the birth of photojournalism as we now know it. (4) The American public already thirsted for visual news of war, and illustrated newspapers did their best to supply it, but Gardner's photographs, because they could not be reproduced print, remained accessible only to a limited number of people. …

The Supreme Court Argument that Saved the Union: Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and the Prize Cases

On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, claiming constitutional authority to do so “as a fit and necessary war measure.” The epic struggle between North and South had been raging for nearly two years. There were over a million soldiers under arms. At Antietam there had been more than 20,000 casualties in the bloodiest single day of battle in American history.1 But was it, in point of law, a war?

The Supreme Court Argument that Saved the Union: Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and the Prize Cases

The Supreme Court Argument that Saved the Union: Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and the Prize Cases JEFFREY L. AMESTOY On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, claiming constitutional authority to do so “as a fit and necessary war measure.” The epic struggle between North and South had been raging for nearly two years. There were over a million soldiers under arms. At Antietam there had been more than 20,000 casualties in the bloodiest single day of battle in American history.1 But was it, in point of law, a war? This astounding question—conceivable under such circumstances only in the U.S. constitutional system—was answered by the Supreme Court in the Prize Cases.2 It was very nearly answered in the negative. That it was not was due to the extraordinary argument ofa lawyer who, fortunately for the history of the United States, went to sea as a young man. Richard Henry Dana, Jr. is today remem­ bered as the author of Two Years Before the Mast, his classic account of a voyage around Cape Horn to the California coast. Published in 1840, the year the twenty-five-year-old Dana opened his law office, the book has never been out of print. Scholars of American literature have expressed regret that Dana “dissipated” his enormous literary talent in the practice of the law.3 But Dana always saw himself, first and foremost, as a lawyer. He had written Two Years Before the Mast, in part, to express his outrage at the unjust and unlawful treatment of seamen.4 Dana’s book brought the young lawyer a succession of clients who seldom had access to legal representation. He quickly built a rep­ utation as a zealous advocate for the common sailor. His office “[i]n those days, and indeed long afterwards, ... was apt to be crowded with unkempt, roughly dressed seamen, and it smelled on such occasions much like a fore­ castle.”5 Dana’s experience at sea shaped and informed his development as a lawyer. By the RICHARD HENRY DANA ll W 1 Richard Henry Dana was twenty-five in 1840 when he wrote Two Years Before the Mast, his first-hand account of a voyage around Cape Horn to California in a merchant vessel similar to the one pictured. This photo of Dana was taken two years later. outbreak of the Civil War, no lawyer in Amer­ ica was more well-versed in maritime law or more experienced in the intricacies of “prize law”—the arcane avenue ofjurisprudence that, in 1863, threatened to unravel Lincoln’s at­ tempt to preserve the Union. The Prize Cases arose from the capture of four vessels—the brig Amy Warwick, the bar­ que Hiawatha, and the schooners Brilliante and Crenshaw—in the early months of the Civil War. Each had been seized pursuant to a blockade of Southern ports proclaimed by President Lincoln in April 1861.6 The right to interdict, seize, and dispose of vessels and cargo belonging to those residing in “enemy’s territory” upon the implementation ofa lawful blockade was a recognized principle of inter­ national law. But the right was predicated on a war between sovereign nations. Lincoln did not accept the claim ofthe Confederacy that it was a sovereign government. He had an equal interest in ensuring that no other nation did either.7 12 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY Lincoln’s first blockade proclamation characterized the Southern secessionists as a “combination of persons” engaged in “an insurrection against the government of the United States.”8 The difficulty posed by this description was that a government engaged in the suppression of an insurrection could “close” its domestic ports but could not, ac­ cording to accepted tenets ofinternational law, “blockade” them.9 Why, then, had Lincoln not chosen to close Southern ports—a decision clearly within his executive authority and con­ sistent with international law? The question had divided Lincoln’s “team of rivals.”10 Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, supported by Attorney General Ed­ ward Bates, argued strenuously against the blockade because its legal validity presup­ posed a conflict between two distinct nations. The issue of whether to close or blockade was...

Traces of A. E. Housman (and Shakespeare) in Hemingway

Hemingway admired Housman’s A Shropshire Lad but dismissed Last Poems . Yet Hemingway’s work shows traces of Housman poems from both volumes. There are resemblances between Housman’s “The Carpenter’s Son” and Hemingway’s “To Will Davies” and Chapter XV of in our time , Housman’s “Soldier from the wars returning” and “Soldier’s Home,” Housman’s “The Deserter” and A Farewell to Arms , Housman’s “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries” and Hemingway’s “The Mercenaries,” and Housman’s “The Day of Battle” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” In the last instance both Housman and Hemingway quote Shakespeare’s most famous lines on courage and cowardice.

“ A blanket of inconsistencies …”: The Battle of Ticonderoga, 2008

“A blanket of inconsistencies…”The Battle of Ticonderoga, 2008 Ian Macpherson McCulloch (bio) The circumstances of this British defeat are shrouded in a blanket of inconsistencies, omissions and differing versions of events. R. F. Kingsley & H. J. Alexander, “The Failure of Abercromby’s Attack on Fort Carillon, July 1758, and the Scapegoating of Matthew Clerk,” Journal of Military History, January 2008. This epigram, selected from the recent offering by Messrs Alexander and Kingsley in the January 2008 JMH, aptly sums up the contribution their article has made to the historiography of this watershed battle of the Seven Years War fought at the junction of the southern end of Lake Champlain and the northern egress of Lake George. In this, the 250th Anniversary of the battle of Ticonderoga, 1758, my real concern stems from their enthusiastic belief (and lack of professional courtesy) that they are presenting original ideas and information to the JMH readership, which is clearly not the case, and, as I will conclusively demonstrate, a matter of public record. I submit that the current scholarship and consensus regarding Matthew Clerk’s whereabouts and activities leading up to and on the day of battle are primarily [End Page 889] the hard detective work and extensive scholarship of Nicholas Westbrook, the Executive Director of the Fort Ticonderoga Museum, and myself, conducted jointly from 1995 to 2000 utilizing thorough ground reconnaissances based on contemporary maps (of which more later), as well as extensive complementary research in the National Archives of Canada, the Scottish National Archives and Fort Ticonderoga’s Thompson-Pell Research Centre. The theories and ideas of Nick Westbrook (who’s far too polite to bring all this up) on Clerk’s role at Fort Ticonderoga are clearly enunciated in his Fort Ticonderoga Bulletin article, “Like Roaring Lions,” Vol. XVI, no. 1 (1998) - an article, I strongly submit, that is clearly more than just “a useful collection of documents” as stated in the subject JMH article. It also happens to be a masterly and definitive analysis of all available primary source evidence related to the battle, including Matthew Clerk’s scapegoating. I might also point out that Messrs Alexander’s and Kingsley’s claim in their Introduction that Matthew Clerk’s letters appear for the “first time” in their JMH article is patently false as one of the two letters to his mother was printed for the first time in Nick Westbrook’s 1998 article (also with the permission of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik). In addition, Messrs Alexander’s and Kingsley’s heavy reliance on the scholarship of Mr John Cardwell, whose abbreviated 1990 M.A. thesis appeared as the 1992 article “Mismanagement: The 1758 Expedition Against Carillon” in The Bulletin of The Fort Ticonderoga Museum, Vol. 15, No. 4, is most disturbing. Here again, I might point out that this article by Cardwell owes much to the judicious and deft editing by the Bulletin’s sagacious editor, Nicholas Westbrook. The discussion of Clerk’s “scapegoating” and the minimalization of his efforts at Carillon has been ongoing since 1990 and, again, is a matter of public record. For the information of the readership, I personally presented the collective research findings of Nick Westbrook and myself on Clerk and Abercromby’s whereabouts on the day of battle at Wilfred Laurier University’s annual Military History Colloquium held in Kitchener/Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in Spring 1999, as well as at the 6th Annual Seven Years War College held at Fort Ticonderoga the same month.1 In 1999, after attending the latter conference, Seven Years War author and College presenter Timothy J. Todish wrote a two part article for the MUZZLELOADER, the pre-eminent magazine in North America for re-enactors and [End Page 890] black-powder enthusiasts (a publication with which I’m sure Mr Alexander, a self-professed re-enactor, is well-acquainted) in which he stated: Nicholas Westbrook and Lt. Col Ian McCulloch have recently discovered some exciting new information about the Abercromby expedition.… With their kind permission, much of this new information has been included in a last minute update of this article. The two most significant revisions are: 1. Abercromby did not remain back at his headquarters at...

Leaders Who Inspire Change

Good evening and welcome to the 74th Annual Conference and Exposition of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA). I am proud to see the thousands of members, families, and friends who have gathered to celebrate the events that are occurring this week. Our theme this year is “It's All About Change.” Honored guests, members, friends, and families of our profession, we are here to celebrate our 74th Annual Conference in our historic nation's capital. We are also here to celebrate the first annual and historic meeting of the newly enacted Representative Body of the National Assembly. And we are here not only to celebrate the close of a decade and a century, but also to soon herald in the new millennium. As great as the accomplishments of our civilization have been in the past thousand years, none have been as great as those that have been accomplished in the past 100 years, such as the inventions of space travel, the telephone, television, the personal computer, the Internet, air-conditioning, fast food, and, of course, Pop-Tarts. Likewise, our Association, the APTA, has achieved great things in the past 78 years—licensure, independent accreditation, and direct access—and, most importantly, APTA has supported our commitment to our patients, to society, and to quality care. What is the magic of our profession? What makes our Association strong? What is the motivating factor that has enabled physical therapists and physical therapist assistants to work their magic? It's the answers to these questions that we need to examine as we go forward into the new millennium. Let me begin with a story. Back in the Middle Ages, a British knight was returning to the castle one evening after a long, hard day of battle. His armor was dented, his helmet was askew, and most of his plumes were …

Zhukov at the Oder: The Decisive Battle for Berlin

Preface Deputy Supreme Commander The Man The Soviets The Germans The Bridgeheads The Vistula-Oder The Struggle for the Bridgeheads Begins The Struggle for the Bridgeheads Continues The Kustrin Corridor and Fortress The East Pomeranian Launching Operation Berlin Planning and Logistics Defense in Depth Orders and Reconnaissance The Big Battle First Day of Battle Second Day of Battle Third Day of Battle Fourth Day of Battle Beyond The Breakthrough The Fate of the German 9th Army Stalin Rules Abbreviations and Symbols Appendices Bibliography Index

The Civil War Memories of Elizabeth Bacon Custer (review)

BOOK REVIEWSI59 would ever see the notation, or so Lincoln thought—perhaps I should say, only his secretary, Lincoln, and all of us fortunate enough to share this and the treasures in the ZaIl book. Frank J. Williams The Ulysses S. Grant Association The Civil WarMemories ofElizabethBacon Custer. Edited by Arlene Reynolds. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Pp. 208. $24.95.) Elizabeth Bacon Custer, widowed at age thirty-four when her husband, Gen. George Armstrong Custer, died at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, spent the remaining years of her life shaping, magnifying, and preserving the public memory of her husband's military career. She delighted audiences with stories of life in the West, and generations of Americans grew up admiring the exploits of Libbie's "warrior bold" in her three books describing Custer's participation in the western Indian campaigns. Now, Arlene Reynolds has taken Libbie's notes and diaries and reconstructed a memory book of the first years of the couple's marriage and the last years of the Civil War. The immediate concern in a book of this nature is its authenticity and integrity with regard to the original author. Although Libbie had planned just such a book, she died leaving the materials scattered and often undated. Reynolds has done an exceptional job in organizing the entries and editing the work for continuity and style. Libbie wrote that her reminiscences were very personal and contained "no information that would be valuable to a historian" (1). While the former is true, one suspects that especially Libbie knew the significance of an insider's glimpse of life on the move in the closing days of battle in that brutal war. Libbie recounts Custer's love of West Point and days filled with youthful escapades and enduring friendships. This sets the stage for recollections of his daring as a cavalry commander and explains the respect and continued goodwill exchanged among officers of both sides. More interesting than the memories of her husband's heroism were her own adventures as a camp follower and her interpretation of the unfolding events. The pampered only child of doting parents, her marriage to the "boy general" threw Libbie into a complex world of military and governmental structure, intrigue, and power. She was sought-out by junior officers, entertained by ambitious politicians, and evaluated by the Washington elite. In spite of her protestations of innocence, historian Shirly Leckie has amply demonstrated Libbie's skill at using these opportunities to ingratiate herself and further her husband's career in Elizabeth Bacon Custer, the Making of a Myth. Libbie's memories of overland flights in a closed ambulance, journeys along mined rivers, and makeshift quarters in confiscated Southern homes behind the lines ring true, encased as they are in her understanding of the proper role of a ?6?CIVIL WAR HISTORY nineteenth-century lady. Readers will also be fascinated by her relationship to Eliza, a former slave hired by Custer to take care of his wife, as well as Libbie's comments about slavery and the war's impact on that institution. The key to understanding Elizabeth Bacon Custer's books lies in a revelation near the end of The Civil War Memories. Many years after the war, Libbie read a biography of Jefferson Davis written by his wife that changed her opinion of him. Libbie wrote, "Her defense of her husband's character . . . made me feel how clever is wifely tact and devotion that would put in all truth and earnestness her husband's better nature before strangers, and make them over as she did me" (148). Libbie made a lifetime career ofthis sentiment, and both the general reader and the historian will find much to enjoy in this book about the Custers' Civil War years. Linda Williams Reese East Central University Ada, Oklahoma Blockaders, Refugees, & Contrabands: Civil War on Florida 's Gulf Coast, 1861-1865. By George E. Buker. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993. Pp. ix, 236. $29.95.) By conventional standards, events in Florida were hardly central to the Civil War. Barely one full-scale military engagement occurred within the state—the minor Battle of Olustee. Accordingly, traditional surveys usually allot...

Napoleon conquers Austria: the 1809 campaign for Vienna

Introduction Strategic Delusion The Armies of 1809 Day of Battle A Combat of Giants Tour de Horizon In Flank and Rear In Search of Battle The Killing Ground The Spoils of War An End to Glory Notes Bibliography

The Discursive Encounter of Spain and America: The Authority of Eyewitness Testimony in the Writing of History

WIC HEN Bernal Diaz del Castillo wrote the Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva Espaia, he feared, he said, that his readers would take as fictional his accounts of ninety-three days of battle because they would seem like the tales in a novel of chivalry.1 A participant in the Vazquez de Coronado expedition of I 540-I 542, Pedro de Castafieda de Na.jera, expressed a similar concern.2 For men like Bernal Diaz and Pedro Castafieda, the challenge of writing history was not only to be believed but also to be acknowledged as authoritative. The relationship between historical testimony and historiographic authority was, without a doubt, one of the central issues in the histories and relations (relaciones) written by participants in the Spanish conquests in America. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, conquistador of Mexico and encomendero of Guatemala, Alvar Nifiez Cabeza de Vaca, shipwreck survivor of Painfilo de Narvaez's expedition to conquer Florida and governor of Rio de la Plata, and Fray Bartolome de Las Casas, ex-encomendero, friar, missionary, bishop, and activist at court on behalf of the natives of America, not only made history but wrote it. Each of them recorded, refuted, and transmitted it, and in doing so, each played a key role in the process of elaborating the discursive encounter of Spain and America. The episodes of this encounter occurred not on the battlefield or at court but in the library, not against the din of battle or the stridency of conciliar debates but in the silence of reading and reflection. Neverthe-

The Imperiled Union: 1861-1865. Vol. 2: Stand in the Day of Battle

The Imperiled Union: 1861-1865. Vol. 2: Stand in the Day of Battle

The Imperiled Union: 1861-1865. Volume 2: Stand in the Day of Battle.

The Imperiled Union: 1861-1865. Volume 2: Stand in the Day of Battle.

Stand in the Day of Battle: Volume 2 of The Imperiled Union, 1861-1865 (review)

Stand in the Day of Battle: Volume 2 of The Imperiled Union, 1861-1865 (review)

The Battle of Salamis

This paper is prompted by a careful study of the ancient evidence and of the waters and coasts of the Salamis Channel, which has led me to a new conception of the battle. I proceed from the assumption that the ancient evidence is sound and that, if it is interpreted with respect, it provides a fairly close framework for the course of the battle. To this framework some additions can be made by means of local knowledge, whether gained at first or at second hand. The paper is divided into five sections: the topography of the Salamis Channel, the evidence for the battle, the manoeuvres of the day and the night before the battle, the day of battle, and an Epilogue with an Appendix on the new Scholia to the Persae.