Famous Battle Research Articles

Gettysburg: memory, market, and an American shrine

The site of North America's greatest battle is a national icon, a byword for Civil War, and an American cliche. Described as the most American place in America, Gettysburg is defended against commercial desecration like no other historic site. Yet even as schoolchildren learn to revere place where Lincoln delivered his most famous speech, Gettysburg's image generates millions of dollars every year from touring, souvenirs, reenactments, films, games, collecting, and Internet. Examining Gettysburg's place in American culture, this book finds that selling of Gettysburg is older than shrine itself. Gettysburg entered market not with recent interest in Civil War nor even with twentieth-century tourism but immediately after battle.Founded by a modern industrial society with capacity to deliver uniform images to millions, Gettysburg, from very beginning, reflected nation's marketing trends as much as its patriotism. Gettysburg's pilgrims - be they veterans, families on vacation, or Civil War reenactors - have always been modern consumers escaping from world of work and responsibility even as they commemorate. And it is precisely this commodification of sacred ground, this tension between commerce and commemoration, that animates Gettysburg's popularity. Gettysburg continues to be a current rather than a past event, a site that reveals more about ourselves as Americans than battle it remembers. Gettysburg is, as it has been since its famous battle, both a cash cow and a revered symbol of our most deeply held values.

Napoleon and Wellington: the Battle of Waterloo--and the great commanders who fought it

An award-winning historian offers an eye-opening view of the relationship between Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington, whose lives moved inexorably to their meeting at Waterloo, one of the most famous battles of all time. At breakfast on the morning of the battle of Waterloo, the Emperor declared that the Duke of was a bad general, the British were bad soldiers and that France could not fail to win an easy victory. Forever afterwards, historians have accused him of gross overconfidence and massively underestimating the caliber of the British commander opposite him. Now Andrew Roberts presents an original, highly revisionist view of the relationship between the two greatest captains of their age and of the great battle that determined European history in the nineteenth century. Napoleon, who was born in the same year as -- 1769 -- fought by proxy years earlier in the Peninsular War, praising his ruthlessness in private while publicly deriding him as a mere general of sepoys. In contrast, publicly lauded Napoleon, saying that his presence on a battlefield was worth forty thousand men, but privately he wrote long memoranda lambasting Napoleon's campaigning techniques. Although saved from execution after Waterloo, the emperor left money in his will to the man who had tried to assassinate the duke. in turn amassed a series of Napoleonic trophies of his great victory, even sleeping with two of the emperor's mistresses. The fascinating, constantly changing relationship between these two historical giants forms the basis of Andrew Roberts's compelling study in pride, rivalry, propaganda, nostalgia and posthumous revenge. It is at once a brilliant work of military history and a triumphant biography. Featuring a cast of fascinating supporting characters -- including the empress Josephine, the Prince Regent and Talleyrand -- Napoleon and Wellington provides the definitive account of the most decisive battle of the nineteenth century.

The Wars of Independence in Spanish America

Christon Archer notes in the preface to his book that the independence period has been attracting renewed attention in recent years, tied in part to the approaching bicentennial of major events. His collection of articles is a useful addition to that reanalysis. In keeping with his particular interests, he has chosen as the focus of his book “the military side of the wars and the nature of insurgency, rebellion, and counterinsurgency”(p. xii). He has put together a stimulating mix of primary and secondary materials, dividing them into four sections, namely, the origins of the wars, the situation in New Spain, the developments in South America, and the “defeat of Spain” (not the victory of the Americans). Some of the pieces he has chosen will be familiar to many readers, as they include articles and sections of books by Brian Hamnett on insurgency in Colombia, Peter Guardino on the war in Guerrero, Stephen Stoan on Pablo Morillo and the war in Venezuela, and Timothy Anna on Peru. A recent but less well-known article by Rebecca Earle that examines the impact of disease and an older piece by Margaret Woodward on the Spanish army give details and differing explanations of why Spain ultimately failed to suppress the colonials. A section of a book by Virginia Guedea on a Mexican insurgent illustrates how petty acts could lie behind military decisions. Archer has translated this selection as well as primary documents on New Spain by the military commander Félix Calleja and the viceroy Juan Ruíz de Apodaca, and on Venezuela by the captain general José de Cevallos. They provide participants’ viewpoints of the developments, indicating some of the difficulties that the royalists faced in their attempts to suppress the revolts and their optimism that success would eventually crown their efforts. Other primary accounts by Major George Flinter, Daniel O’Leary, and General H. L. V. Ducoudray Holstein are more analytical. They elaborate on the military events in New Granada while presenting contending views of Simón Bolívar. Archer introduces all of these with an original article that supplies an overview of the events and the literature and sets the scene for his selections.Any criticisms of the book will probably rest more on what has been left out than what has been included. New Spain looms large in the volume as a whole, which in view of the fact that it had become the center of Spain’s American empire by the late colonial period is probably justified. Some, however, may take exception, possibly on the grounds that this was a theater marked largely by insurrection and counterinsurgency and not the famous battles that are associated with the independence wars. The lack of details about what took place in Argentina and Chile may also upset a few. In addition to a discussion of the military events as they affected in the Southern Cone, the inclusion of a piece about the futility of campaigns at this time—the mindless marching through mud and rain with nothing to show for the soldiers’ efforts except exhaustion and frustration—would have been useful. A description of a set-piece battle would also have been welcome, as it would have reinforced the central theme of the book as well as illustrating once again the brutality that marked the period. Nevertheless, one completes this book with a better understanding of what were truly chaotic times, as well as the role of the military that was obviously essential to the revolutionaries’ ultimate success. Spanish American independence was not going to be secured by negotiation and concession, and the selections leave no doubt as to why military men remained important throughout Spanish America once the fight for independence had finally been won.Designed as a reader for undergraduate courses, instructors may wish to assign it to more senior students, as Archer’s selections leave many questions unanswered and contradictory points unexplained; for example, from what is presented here the reader is still left unclear whether Bolívar was a hero or an inhumane brute. The lack of definitive answers may frustrate those undergraduates expecting clear answers, but it points to another of the strengths of this book. Archer has tried to force the reader to think, and for this—and for his selection of readings— he is to be highly commended.

Joint and integrated logistics system for the defence services

The importance of logistics in actual warfighting cannot be exaggerated as many famous battles have been lost owing to a lack of logistic support. The future wars are going to become increasingly complex demanding logistical ingenuity and organisational skills of a very high order. On the other hand, the future wars are also going to emphasise the need for joint operations with increased tempo, non‐linearity in the battlefront and reduced timings for decision‐cycle. It is also being said that the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is being accompanied by the Revolution in Business Affairs (RBA), using the tools of information technology (IT). Similarly, IT is also being used to usher in a Revolution in Military Logistics (RML). This RML enjoins upon the three services to evolve a common and integrated approach towards logistic concepts and doctrines. The article takes a look at the existing system, its weaknesses and how they can.be rectified.

Race for the Reichstag: the 1945 battle for Berlin

Bulletin of the Military Historical Society, No 199, Feb 2000 The story is very well researched from German and Soviet records, laying many of the Soviet propaganda myths. A famous battle now well recorded using the latest research material available. Stone and Stone Second World War Books, on the Internet at http://www.sonic.net/~bstone/bookinfo.html The original was the best English-language book about the Soviet capture of Berlin in 1945, and the new edition is even better ... Good maps, interesting photos, excellent OBs for both sides ... While some of the tactical minutiae might be missing, this is a potent book and the revised edition remains the best account of the fighting in Berlin at the end of the war in Europe. Highly recommended. Choice- Using Soviet records as well as numerous German archival and memoir sources, Le Tissier has written a vivid account of the final battle of WW II in Europe. His book deserves to be in all WW II collections.

Equine Relics of the Civil War

In the first battle of the Civil War, the only casualty was a horse. When the smoke lifted after the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861, southerners hailed the bloodless victory that yielded the federal fort into Confederate hands without the loss of a single human life. death of an army horse in the shelling all but escaped notice. In the years of conflict that followed, horses played a critical military role, as mounts for officers and cavalry, as transport for artillery, and as all-purpose conveyance for the wide variety of army movements. Present in every Civil War camp and on every battlefield, horses suffered and died in numbers that rivaled even the Civil War's high rate of human devastation. An estimated 1,500,000 horses and mules were wounded or killed, or died of disease in the war, as compared with 970,000 military casualties.(1) Civil War soldiers both noticed and ignored this slaughter, just as we ourselves have at once remembered and forgotten the Civil War horse. In the aftermath of the war's great battles, care of the human wounded and dead took obvious priority. As Confederate general Richard Ewell once explained to a distraught civilian horrified by a horse rotting near her house, he had more important business on hand just then than burying dead horses. Yet soldiers' commentary on battlefield scenes almost inevitably included remarks about the dead animals strewn across the ground. After Shiloh, as one soldier observed, it was possible to walk from one side of the field to the other stepping only on horse carcasses.(2) Disposal of horses' remains was of course a real problem. After the battle of Gettysburg, for example, as many as five million pounds of horse flesh to be removed from the field. But dead horses represented more than simply a logistical challenge. Soldiers sentimentalized horses, often projecting onto them feelings they suppressed about the human cost of One Union soldier remarked after the 2 July 1863 fighting at Peach. Orchard, The poor horses fared badly and as we passed, scores of these ungazetted heroes stood upon their maimed limbs regarding us with a silent look of reproach that was almost human in expression. A Georgia officer regarded the death of his beloved mount Barnaby at Chickamauga as a symbol of the injustice and irrationality of war: He done no one any harm, but his faithful work for man was now to be rewarded with a grape shot from a cannon's cruel mouth. His fate breathes a reproach and cries out against this inhuman war. As a Union chaplain observed about a horse brutally killed at Chancellorsville, I hardly remember a sight that touched my heart so keenly during the entire battle. innocent animal no part in the fight, but he was a silent victim.(3) horse's innocence has remained an important part of twentieth-century memory. But the Civil War horse lives on as more than a victim. best known of the animals have been glorified as soldiers and campaigners, themselves honored as veterans of the Americans of the second half of the twentieth century have in a quite literal sense been able to come closer to the Civil War horse than to any of the conflict's other veterans. Dead soldiers, Union or Confederate, privates or generals, heroes or bounty jumpers, were interred or entombed, hidden from sight, memorialized in statues or in photographs that for all their realism are clearly just representations on paper or in stone. But real Civil War horses--or at least parts of them-- have actually been preserved. Stonewall Jackson's Little Sorrel and Philip Sheridan's mount--variously known as Rienzi or Winchester, after his most famous battle--had their carcasses stuffed. Old Baldy, the horse of General Meade, victorious Union commander at Gettysburg, was buried for several days before two of Meade's former soldiers were inspired to preserve him, so only his head and shoulders were successfully disinterred and sent to the taxidermist. …

Entre mémoire et politique : Bouvines revisité à sept cents ans de distance

Antoine Calagué, Between Memory and Politics : Bouvines Revisited Seven Hundred Years Later. The famous battle of Bouvines is in 1914 the object of commemorative ceremonies for its seventh centenary. Various patriotic ceremonies are organized, the most important of which being held in Bouvines. It is the mayor of the village, archetype of the notability, who organizes it. His Catholicism and his royalism can be found at certain levels, but he is forced to make up whith a Republic that has just voted the Church and State Separation Law. The commemoration of the battle is thus the opportunity for a new fight, this time with symbols. The luncheons, the festivals, the shouting consensus, it is not however neutral. Moreover to national stakes are superimposed local stakes with the will to create a patrimony in order to claim the monopoly on the memory of the battle. Finally, these commemorations offer some groups highly committed to producing an extensive literature (press, monographies, essays) the opportunity to indulge in a nationalist reading of the battle. The Germanophobia that is thus kept alive produces cohesion, because, for a whole section of the right the common and unique enemy is the German.

Singing as a Therapeutic Agent, inThe Etude, 1891-1949.

The Etude music magazine, founded by Theodore Presser, was one of a number of popular music magazines published in the years prior to the establishment of the music therapy profession in 1950. During its publication run from 1883 to 1957, over 100 music therapy related articles appeared, including 13 on the health benefits of singing published between 1891 and 1949. Written by authors with diverse backgrounds, such as the famous Battle Creek, Michigan physician John Harvey Kellogg and Boston music critic Louis C. Elson, the articles contained consistent and adamant support regarding the health benefits of singing. The advantages described were both physical and psychological, and were recommended prophylactically for well persons and therapeutically for ill persons. Although the articles varied in perspective, from philosophical to theoretical to pedagogical, there is a consistent holistic medicine theme that appeared almost ahead of its time and no doubt linked to the push for vocal music education in that era. The importance of The Etude in promulgating ideas that helped shape the early practice of music therapy should not be underestimated. For much of its publication run The Etude was the largest music periodical in print, reaching its peak circulation of 250,000 copies per month in 1924.

Peter Caulder: A Free Black Soldier and Pioneer in Antebellum Arkansas

ON JUNE 18, 1812, PRESIDENT JAMES MADISON signed into law the war bill that Congress had narrowly passed the day before. Madison, exasperated by unfriendly British actions at sea during the Napoleonic Wars, thus led his country into war against a powerful adversary. The established army numbered less than twelve thousand men, but immediately eager volunteers flocked to recruiting booths. Recruits who signed on for five-year regular army terms formed the core of the military, but campaigners counted on state militia units to provide much of the punch-if the timing of battles was right. Militiamen enlisted for three months at a time, after which most went home, even if a major engagement loomed just ahead.1 Patriotic citizens too busy or too wealthy to serve for three months could round up substitutes to join state militia. One such substitute was South Carolinian Peter Caulder, a colored who eventually came to own one hundred-sixty acres in Arkansas Territory by virtue of his War of 1812 service. Eleven days after the declaration of war, one Alexander Lane sent Caulder in his place to join the 5th (Keith's) South Carolina Regiment, where he became part of Capt. Elisha Bethea's company. Two other free colored men, Martin Turner and James Turner, enlisted in the same regiment as Caulder on the same day, June 29, 1812.2 Captain Bethea and his green recruits probably had no opportunity to march into battle, since, during that first summer of war, the nine land engagements that occurred between U.S. and British, Canadian, or Indian forces took place north of the Ohio River, hundreds of miles from South Carolina. By September 29, 1812, when his ninety days expired, Caulder had earned for Lane, a white man, nineteen dollars and ninety-eight cents, computed at a rate of six dollars and sixty-six cents per month.3 Two years later the threat of British victory motivated Congress to strengthen the army by offering cash and a one-hundred-sixty-acre land bounty for new recruits. An easing of the unwritten rule of an exclusively white soldiery enlarged the manpower pool and cracked open the door to regular army service for Caulder and other free black men.4 Caulder's state militia experience evidently convinced this young, landless mulatto that adventure and advancement awaited him in the army. He seized the opportunity, becoming one of those Americans of African descent whose service in the first quarter of the nineteenth century briefly integrated the U.S. army, including, in the case of Caulder, units along the frontier in Arkansas. On September 2, 1814, at the Marion County Courthouse, South Carolina, Caulder joined the 3rd Rifles, one of four new fifteen-hundredman regiments being readied to take on the British. Two weeks earlier, Caulder's militia comrades Martin Turner and James Turner had enlisted in the same unit. The Turner and Caulder families were neighbors whose property on Catfish Creek adjoined. While Caulder's parentage is to this point unknown, the young Turner brothers may be traced back two generations to John Turner, who had a white mother of the Irish breed and a black father. Under South Carolina law, any child born to a white woman and a black man was considered free colored, but entitled to the same privileges as whites, including rights in ownership of property and slaves.5 Caulder's regiment, raised in the Carolinas and Virginia, came into being too late and in the wrong place to see action against British troops. Only a handful of engagements occurred after September 1814, the principal one being, of course, at New Orleans, in which free black Louisianans fought with Gen. Andrew Jackson against the British. Before that famous battle Jackson had echoed the army's new racial toleration by summoning American blacks to rally round the standard of the Eagle, proclaiming: Every noble hearted free man of Color, volunteering to serve during the present contest with Great Britain, and no longer, there will be paid the same bounty in money and lands, now received by the white soldiers of the United States, namely, one hundred and twenty-four dollars in money and one hundred and sixty acres of land. …

The Art of Warfare in Western Europe During the Middle Ages from the Eighth Century to 1340 by J.F. Verbruggen (review)

REVIEWS155 In sum, this book strikes one as a possible response to the editors' realization that their series lacked a medieval volume. Its texts ultimately isolated from currents they might have created or in which they may have shared, To the Glory ofHer Sexwill be useful primarily as a reference of first instance. JOHN CARMI PARSONS University ofToronto j.F. verbruggen, The Art ofWarfare in Western Europe During the Middle Agesfrom the Eighth Century to 1340. 2nd ed., revised and enlarged. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1997. Pp. x, 388. 6 leaves of plates, isbn: 0-85115-630. $71. In 1954, the eminent Belgian histotian J.F. Vetbruggen published De Krijgskunst in West-Europa in deMiddeleeuwen I)C tot begin XlV'eeuw. This work was subsequently ttanslated into English by Sumner Willard and Mrs. R.W. Southern, published in a somewhat abridged form twenty years ago by North Holland, and immediately recognized as the best survey ofmedieval warfare then available in English, although priced too high for much ofits potential audience. Now we have what is described as a revised and enlarged edition, published in Britain as part of the series Warfare in History under the general editorship ofMatthew Bennett. Actually, this edition appeats to be the same translation of the original work, with the inclusion of footnotes and restotation ofthose sections omitted from the eatlier English edition. What made Verbruggen's work so important was his insistence that eatlier military historians, including those best known to readers of English, had failed to give the narrative sources a sufficiently careful and critical reading. As a consequence, they tended to exaggerate the size of medieval armies and to treat medieval battles as disorganized brawls consisting mainly ofindividual combats and lacking any tactical coherence. Verbruggen's reading of the sources led him to conclude that military forces were much smaller than fotmerly claimed, that mounted warriors regulatly fought in groups as small tactical units, and that commanders showed considerable tactical skill in the maneuvering and ordering ofthese units. In the decades since his book originally appeared, Verbruggen's arguments have generally prevailed, and his influence can be seen in many more recent wotks on medieval military history. Aside from its important central thesis, the great sttength ofthe book isVerbruggen's careful reconstruction of vatious famous battles, occupying large parts of the third and fourth chapters (on 'Footsoldiers' and 'General Tactics,' respectively). These chapters are preceded by a short but important one on 'Historiographical Problems' and a long one on 'The Knights.' Despite his attention to othet kinds of fighting men, Verbruggen has limited his study to the centuries in which European warfare was dominated by heavy cavalry, and these knights necessarily dominate the entire work. Geographical coverage ofmedieval warfare is very uneven. Most ofthe evidence is drawn from the Middle East during the century of the first three crusades or from campaigns fought in or near the Low Countries. Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Slavic Europe are not neglected, but Spain and Scandinavia are virtually ignoted, as 156arthuriana is Byzantium except in connection with the crusades. Battles receive vastly more treatment than sieges despite the importance ofthe latter in medieval warfare. Castles are mentioned almost in passing and in connection with defensive warfare, with no attention to their role in an offensive strategy or in the evolution ofmilitary society. These aspects of uneven coverage are the most notable teminder that we are reading a fortyyear-old book. The editor dealswith the problem ofout-datedness by furnishing a full and up-to-date bibliography and supplying, in brackets, occasional addenda to footnotes, indicating when a more recent work has provided an important new perspective. Surprisingly, however, there are no maps, not even the very helpful battle plans that appeared in the previous English edition. Verbruggen's topical arrangement, while effective in making his basic point, does not leave the teader with any consciousness of chronological development. We get little sense ofthe evolution ofarmor, weapons, fortifications, and tactics over a period of several centuries, or whether, and to what extent, medieval commanders learned from the successes and failutes oftheir predecessors. Verbruggen's decision not to go beyond the early fourteenth century may have been...

War lesions from the famous Portuguese Medieval battle of Aljubarrota

The corpses of the warriors of the famous battle of Aljubarrota, 1385, were laid in disorder in a common burial ground at the battlefield. The material was excavated in 1958 and then transferred, at least partly, to the Department of Anthropology of the Coimbra University (Portugal). The sample consists of 400 individuals represented mainly by their long bone fragments. Complete bones are an exception which implies that it is not possible with this material to reconstruct the different skeletons. In the preliminary anthropological analysis of these individuals, the majority of them males who died between 20 and 60 years old, the bone injuries were the most relevant observation. In this paper we refer to the most striking lesions due to violent and aggressive actions during fighting such as cuts, fractures, infections and eventual amputations. The probable causes of those wounds are also approached. # 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Int. J. Osteoarchaeol., 7: 595-599 (1997) No. of Figures: 2. No. of Tables: 0. No. of

A woman of valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War

When the Civil War broke out, Clara Barton wanted, more than anything else, to become a Union soldier. Determined to serve, she became instead a one-woman relief agency. She made her way to the front lines and supplied medical relief to the victims of some of the most famous battles of the war. After the war she became the founder of the Red Cross. Two 8-page inserts.

Lies, Libels, and the Truth of Fiction

LIES, LIBELS, AND THE TRUTH OF FICTION / Naomi Jacobs ALL LITERATURE IS SCRAP art, manufactured out of old sights, -¿A. sounds, conversations, rumors, memories, visions, which are smelted down and recycled, or cut into patterns and stitched together, or simply relabeled like old bottles, retaining their original shapes but wearing new names and containing different potions. This insistent acquisitiveness of literature, this itch to capture, preserve, replicate, or transform the things of the world, is particularly characteristic of the novel, which from its inception has claimed truths more referential than those of most poetry and drama, establishing that referentiality by the baldfaced lie, "The story you are about to read is true. Only the names have been changed," or by the subtler persuasions of recognizable small truths, including recognizable people, that seem to corroborate the big lies. Even before Defoe and Richardson, the earliest "novels" drew upon truths of history as the threads for their fabrics of deception. As far back as 1593, in Thomas Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller, Jack Wilton follows Henry VIITs war to the continent, travels to Italy with Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, meets Erasmus and "merry Sir Thomas More," and sees Luther debate Carolostadius ("Luther had the loudest voice, Carolostadius went beyond him in beating and bouncing with his fists"). From famous battles and battlers to scholarly entertainments given by the Duke of Saxony, these recognizable events and people give Jack's picaresque romance-memoir the air of truth, despite its exuberantly picturesque and literary language. Less than a century later, Aphra Behn had an enormous success with her Love-Letters from a Nobleman to his Sister, which presented in epistolary form an imagined account of the weU-known scandalous elopement of Lord Grey with his sister-in-law. Today the book would be called a nonfiction novel; then it was probably taken quite simply as truth. And this danger of being taken literally raised a central ethical question for writers: to what extent can a writer legitimately use another person for fictional ends, possibly exposing that person to unwanted attention, ridicule, or contempt? The ethical question raised a legal question as well: whether, and to what extent, a work of fiction can be termed libellous. Through the masking tactics of changed names and circumstances, most novelists have managed to evade both of these questions. But in recent years, the increasing importance of nonfiction elements in serious fiction has again brought them to the fore. According to one authority on civil law, William Prosser's Handbook of 164 · The Missouri Review the Law of Torts, "A great deal of the law of defamation makes no sense," and perhaps nowhere is this more true than in the law's application to fiction. For that law has accreted like a coral reef from the dessicated skeletons of thousands of legal cases, most of which concern nonfiction or journalism. Novels charged as libellous have generally been squeezed into a Procrustean bed of precedents based on genres with very different methods and effects, even though legal commentators and literary ones alike have tended to feel that fiction should be treated differently than accounts which present themselves as factual. The history of libel cases involving fiction, except for those cases where novelists have sued each other or, like Fenimore Cooper, have sued a critic, is generally a history of unknown works by unknown writers, perhaps because the talents of more skillful writers can turn even an unflattering portrayal into a sort of distinction, perhaps because better writers more completely integrate their original materials, perhaps simply because their fame makes them less vulnerable as targets. For whatever reasons, only a handful of cases exist that have dealt with the unique qualities of fictional truth as it might constitute the "falsity" demanded by most definitions of libel. But the threat of libel prosecution still produces a peculiar form of writer's cramp for those novelists who want to tell a certain kind of truth. Literary depictions of real people have always come under legal restraints, particularly when the writer has actually named names. The first Roman legal records, the Twelve Tables, invoked the death penalty for only two practices, one of which...

Chemistry, solid propellants and history

The important role of solid propellants in four famous battles (Waterloo, Manila Bay, the Battle of the Bulge, and Pusan).

Race, Sex and Self: Aspects of Bildung in Select Novels by Black American Women Novelists

As in other aspects of America's literary culture, any consideration of variants in development of the Bildungsroman genre would be less textured without inclusion of works by Black women authors. While the novels of Black American male writers have been replete with scenes of initiation more typical of Western Bildungsroman tradition (i.e., the famous Battle Royal scene in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, episodic agony from familial and societal oppression in Richard Wright's Black Boy and youthful religious confessions in James Baldwin's Go Tell It On The Mountain), representative novels by Black American women writers have no similar preoccupations with adolescent recognitions. Virtually to a woman,1 they have not devoted comparable, measurable space in their works to the components traditional in Western Bildungsroman (that is according to the standards set forth by well-known scholars of the genre, Jerome Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, and Ray L. Ackerman, Bildung and Verbildung in the Prose Fiction Works of Otto Julius Bierbaum): first physical awakenings; dramatic adolescent conflicts and later reconciliation with family, religion, educational systems or national community.2 When using Bildungsroman themes these women writers did not even choose the adolescent years as appropriate frameworks for Black feminine rites of passage; nor as novelists do they concentrate on youthful recognition of racial rejection by the dominant white society. Rather, they collectively depict the Black woman's internal struggle to unravel the immense complexities of racial identity, gender definitions (in contexts of Black and not white experience), and awakening of sexual being in short to discover, direct, and recreate the self in the midst of hostile racial, sexual and other societal repression to produce a literature not confined to usual Bildung development at set chronological ages. From the first novel by a Black American woman in 1892, Frances E. W. Harper's lola Leroy: Or Shadows Uplifted, through the prolific period of the Harlem Renaissance in which several Black women writers ap-

The Medieval Sources of Spenser’s Occasion Episode

For nearly 250 years commentators have been trying to explain why the hag Occasion in Faerie Queene II.iv differs in appearance and function from her presumed source, the classical Occasio. The usual explanation assumes that Spenser Combined the features of Occasio with those of other figures such as Envy, Discord, Allecto or Poeana, and in doing so he also changed or transmuted the meaning of the original icon. But in fact all of the characteristic features of Spenser's hag -- not just her old age, ugliness, tattered clothing and reproachful tongue, but her staff, limp and forelock as well -- were attributes of Misfortune (Fortune in her unpleasant aspect) in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The name Occasion simply means that she represents those specific instances of misfortune which occasion (give rise to) anger or despair. The fight between Guyon and Occasion, in which he binds her to a post and later allows Pyrochloes to release her, drives from the famous battle between Fortune and Poverty in Boccaccio's De casibus. Certain modifications in the action suggest that Spenser was influenced by the simplified pictures of the story found in some manuscripts of the French translation; and in fact three of the four illuminated copies known to have been in England during the Renaissance contain such illustrations.

The Arab/Muslim Presence in Medieval Central Europe

For nearly three centuries after the famous Battle of Poitiers (Tours), which is usually regarded as the high-water mark of Arab/Muslim expansion into Western Europe, the Muslims continued to maintain a series of relatively isolated presences in regions of Western Europe outside the Iberian Peninsula. Although these presences have tended to be forgotten within the larger picture of Muslim/Christian relationships during the medieval period, the researches of some nineteenth and twentieth century scholars would seem to indicate that they left behind a considerably larger legacy than has previously been suspected.

The Memoirs of Richard III

A word of explanation. Amid some controversy, historians have generally presented King Richard All of England as a thoroughly evil man who clawed his way to power over the corpses of his many victims and who was killed finally in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. These recently discovered memoirs reveal, however, that the crowned and ironclad man who died in that famous battle was really a loyal double on special assignment. Richard himself lived, not to fight another day, but to write his memoirs during his final years of secluded retirement in Cornwall, on the west coast.The memoirs also make it perfectly clear that Richard was a man of exalted integrity, unimpeachable intentions, and sterling virtues, a hero whose reputation was irreparably blackened by malevolent and irresponsible chroniclers.The brief but significant excerpts that follow are presented essentially unaltered, although the language has been modernized for easier reading and some of the gamier expletives have been deleted.

The Role of the Anugītā in the Understanding of the Bhagavadgītā

Sometime after the famous fratricidal battle among the Bharatas known as the Mahābhārata war was over (on the eve of which the Bhagavadgītā had been revealed to Arjuna by Krŗşņa), Arjunarequested Krŗşņa… to repeat the instruction which had already been conveyed to him on ‘the holy field of Kurukşetra’ but which had gone out of his ‘degenerate mind’. Kŗşņa thereupon protests that he is not equal to a verbatim recapitulation of the Bhagavadgītā but agrees in lieu of that to impart to Arjuna the same instruction in other words, through the medium of a certain ancient story – or purātana itihāsa. And the instruction thus conveyed constitutes what is called the Anugītā, a name which is in itself an embodiment of this anecdote.

War and Society in The Tenth Century: the Maldon Campaign

A general study of the effects of the Viking Wars on Anglo-Saxon society is much to be desired. These wars lasted from the last years of the Mercian hegemony to the last months of the life of William the Conqueror. It has been abundantly shown that the English did not catch institutions from the Vikings like a sort of social measles, but common-sense alone suggests that a three hundred years war with little more than one generation's respite must have had consequences. Such a study is far too large for a single paper. What I have sought to do, therefore, is take a single campaign, that culminating in the famous battle of Maldon, which occurred at a moment of intense crisis and to try to set this campaign in a context of the relevant political and military problems of the day, and most of what I have to say relates to the much-dismissed, little studied, but well-evidenced, reign of Æthelred II.