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showing 602 library results for '1815'

Coastal defences of the British Empire in the Revolutionary & Napoleonic eras / Daniel MacCannell. "Far more than an architecture book, Coastal Defences of the British Empire in the Revolutionary & Napoleonic Eras is a sweeping reinterpretation of the Martello towers, Grand Redoubts, Royal Military Canal and other new defence infrastructure. Lavishly illustrated with period maps, views, portraits, cartoons and newly commissioned colour photographs, it includes not only these structures' forerunners, and plans that were never executed, but also the grand strategy that informed them. At its best, this saw Britain's position as a vast land battle, with the deadly threat of the French-held Antwerp navy yards on its own 'left wing', and Lisbon as the enemy's 'weak left' to be 'turned'. The book also takes in the astonishingly inventive, bold and bloody small-boat wars that raged from the Baltic and Channel coast to Chesapeake Bay and Lake Ontario, and provides vivid pen-sketches of the now-obscure and sometimes deeply flawed strategic visionaries, engineers, inventors, and fighting men who held the line as - even after Trafalgar - the forces of an ever more powerful French empire circled like sharks. Along the way, it traces a fundamental change in the nature of war and society: from a ponderous game of fortresses and colonies played by rulers, to murderous 'foot by foot' defence of the whole territory of the nation by 'both sexes and every social type'."--Provided by the publisher. 2021. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 355.4509171241
Master and madman : the surprising rise and disastrous fall of the Hon Anthony Lockwood RN /by Peter Thomas & Nicholas Tracy. "Anthony Lockwood s story is at the heart of the Georgian Navy though the man himself has never taken centre stage in its history. His naval career described by himself as twenty five years incessant peregrination followed a somewhat erratic course but almost exactly spanned the period of the French wars and the War of 1812. Lockwood was commended for bravery in action against the French; was present at the Spithead Mutiny; shipwrecked and imprisoned in France; appointed master attendant of the naval yard at Bridgetown, Barbados, during the year the slave trade was abolished; and served as an hydrographer before beginning his three-year marine survey of Nova Scotia and the Bay of Fundy. Against the odds he managed to finesse a treasury appointment as Surveyor General of New Brunswick and became the right hand man of the Governor, General Smyth. Deeply ingrained in his character, however, was a democratic determination that was out of step with the authoritarian character of the Navy and the aristocratic one of New Brunswick. His expectation of social justice verged on madness, and when he finally succumbed to lunacy it was in the defence of democracy. The turbulence of the times inspired Lockwood to stage a one-man coup d etat which ended with him being jailed and shipped back to London to live out his days as a pensioner and mental patient. Truly a dramatic rise and a tragic fall." 2012. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 92LOCKWOOD