HISTORY / Military / General

If we do in fact “remember the Alamo,” it is largely thanks to one person who witnessed the final assault and survived: the commanding officer’s slave, a young man known simply as Joe. What Joe saw as the Alamo fell, recounted days later to the Texas Cabinet, has come down to us in records and newspaper reports. But who Joe was, where he came from, and what happened to him have all remained mysterious until now. In a remarkable feat of historical detective work, authors Ron J. Jackson, Jr., and Lee Spencer White have fully restored this pivotal yet elusive figure to his place in the American story.

The Rise and Fall of an Officer Corps tells the story of that moment in the military history of modern China—how it came to be, why it ultimately failed, and what it meant for China at home and abroad.
 

The conflict that historians have called King Philip’s War still ranks as one of the bloodiest per capita in American history. An Indian coalition ravaged much of New England, killing six hundred colonial fighting men (not including their Indian allies), obliterating seventeen white towns, and damaging more than fifty settlements. The version of these events that has come down to us focuses on Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay—the colonies whose commentators dominated the storytelling. But because Connecticut lacked a chronicler, its experience has gone largely untold. As Jason Warren makes clear in Connecticut Unscathed, this imbalance has generated an incomplete narrative of the war.

The Campaigns of Sargon II demonstrates how Sargon changed the geopolitical dynamics in the Near East, inspired a period of cultural florescence, established long-lasting Assyrian supremacy, and became one of the most influential kings of the ancient world.

This book, the first historical study of its kind, makes a compelling case for raiding and irregular naval warfare as a key element in the story of American sea power.
 

Based on more than thirty years of research into surviving official, semi-official, and private correspondence, Beckett’s work offers an intimate and occasionally amusing picture of what might affect an officer’s career: wealth, wives, and family status; promotion boards and strategic preferences; performance in the field and diplomatic outcomes.

A challenge to historical orthodoxy, In the Year of the Tiger presents a more balanced interpretation of the French war for Indochina. At the same time, the book alters and expands our understanding of the precedents and the dynamics of America’s Vietnam War.
 

In the wake of Braddock’s defeat at Fort Duquesne in 1755, the British army raised the 60th, or Royal American, Regiment of Foot to fight the French and Indian War. Each of the regiment’s four battalions saw action in pivotal battles throughout the conflict. And as Alexander Campbell shows, the inclusion of foreign mercenaries and immigrant colonists alongside British volunteers made the RAR a microcosm of the Atlantic world. Not just a potent, combat-ready force, it played a key role in trade, migration, Indian diplomacy, and settlement.

In nine essays by leading scholars, European Armies of the French Revolution, 1789–1802 provides an authoritative, continent-wide analysis of the organization and constitution of these armies, the challenges they faced, and the impact they had on the French Revolutionary Wars and on European military practices. The volume opens with editor Frederick C. Schneid’s substantial introduction, which reviews the strategies and policies of each participating state throughout the wars, establishing a clear context for the essays that follow.