A masterly look at the value and limitations of intelligence in the conduct of war from the premier military historian of our time, John Keegan.
Intelligence gathering is an immensely complicated and vulnerable endeavor. And it often fails. Until the invention of the telegraph and radio, information often traveled no faster than a horse could ride, yet intelligence helped defeat Napoleon. In the twentieth century, photo analysts didn’t recognize...

"The diplomatic origins, so-called, of the War are only the fever chart of the patient; they do not tell us what caused the fever. To probe for underlying causes and deeper forces one must operate within the framework of a whole society and try to discover what moved the people in it."--Barbara W. Tuchman The fateful quarter-century leading up to the World War I was a time when the world of Privilege still existed in Olympian luxury and the world...

"In this ambitious and far-ranging work, Alexander Mikaberidze argues that the Napoleonic Wars can only be fully understood in an international perspective. France struggled for dominance not only on the plains of Europe but also in the Americas, West and South Africa, Ottoman Empire, Iran, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Taking specific regions in turn, Mikaberidze discusses major political-military...

An integrated research experience, Gale Primary Sources unifies extensive digital archives and enables researchers to make never-before-possible research connections. The Gale Primary Sources program combines dozens of historical archives covering hundreds of years of history. In this exhaustive resource you will find monographs, manuscripts, newspapers, maps, and photographs. Gale continues to make additional primary source collections available...

" A major intellectual history of the American Revolution and its influence on later revolutions in Europe and the Americas, the Expanding Blaze is a sweeping history of how the American Revolution inspired revolutions throughout Europe and the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jonathan Israel, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment, shows how the radical ideas of American founders such as Paine, Jefferson,...

"American Midwest to Shanghai, from London to Tokyo, the 1850s was a decade of extraordinary change and upheaval: the world economy expanded fivefold; millions of families emigrated to the ends of the earth to carve out lives in the wilderness; new technologies revolutionized how people communicated; and railways cut across great continents. Steam ships, telegraphs, photographs and pharmaceuticals all proliferated. In Heyday, an epic story of global...