The Crimean War And Its Afterlife

The mid-nineteenth century's Crimean War is frequently dismissed as an embarrassment, an event marred by blunders and an occasion better forgotten. In The Crimean War and its Afterlife Lara Kriegel sets out to rescue the Crimean War from the shadows. Kriegel offers a fresh account of the conflict and its afterlife: revisiting beloved figures like Florence Nightingale and hallowed events like the Charge of the Light Brigade, while also turning attention to newer worthies, including Mary Seacole. In this book a series of six case studies transport us from the mid-Victorian moment to the current day, focusing on the heroes, institutions, and values wrought out of the crucible of the war. Time and again, ordinary Britons looked to the war as a template for social formation and a lodestone for national belonging. With lucid prose and rich illustrations, this book vividly demonstrates the uncanny persistence of a Victorian war in the making of modern Britain.

Rescuing the Crimean War from the shadows, Lara Kriegel demonstrates the centrality of a Victorian war to the making of modern Britain.

The Crimean War is full of resonance - not least, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Siege of Sevastopol and Florence Nightingale at Scutari with her lamp. In this fascinating book, Clive Ponting separates the myths from the reality, and tells the true story of the heroism of the ordinary soldiers, often through eye-witness accounts of the men who fought and those who survived the terrible winter of 1854-55. To contemporaries, it was 'The Great War with Russia' - fought not only in the Black Sea and the Crimea but in the Baltic, the Arctic, the Pacific and the Caucasus. Ironically, Britain's allies were France, her traditional enemy, ably commanded (from home) by Napoleon III himself, and the Muslim Ottoman Empire, widely seen as an infidel corrupt power. It was the first of the 'modern' wars, using rifles, artillery, trench systems, steam battleships, telegraph and railways; yet the British soldiers wore their old highly coloured uniforms and took part in their last cavalry charge in Europe. There were over 650,000 casualties. Britain was unable fully to deploy her greatest strength, her Navy, while her Army was led by incompetent aristocrats. The views of ordinary soldiers about Raglan, Cardigan and Lucan make painful reading.

Please note that the maps available in the print edition do not appear in the ebook. From "the great storyteller of modern Russian historians," (Financial Times) the definitive account of the forgotten war that shaped the modern age The Charge of the Light Brigade, Florence Nightingale—these are the enduring icons of the Crimean War. Less well-known is that this savage war (1853-1856) killed almost a million soldiers and countless civilians; that it enmeshed four great empires—the British, French, Turkish, and Russian—in a battle over religion as well as territory; that it fixed the fault lines between Russia and the West; that it set in motion the conflicts that would dominate the century to come. In this masterly history, Orlando Figes reconstructs the first full conflagration of modernity, a global industrialized struggle fought with unusual ferocity and incompetence. Drawing on untapped Russian and Ottoman as well as European sources, Figes vividly depicts the world at war, from the palaces of St. Petersburg to the holy sites of Jerusalem; from the young Tolstoy reporting in Sevastopol to Tsar Nicolas, haunted by dreams of religious salvation; from the ordinary soldiers and nurses on the battlefields to the women and children in towns under siege.. Original, magisterial, alive with voices of the time, The Crimean War is a historical tour de force whose depiction of ethnic cleansing and the West's relations with the Muslim world resonates with contemporary overtones. At once a rigorous, original study and a sweeping, panoramic narrative, The Crimean War is the definitive account of the war that mapped the terrain for today's world..

Winner of the 2021/2022 People's Book Prize Best Achievement Award Homes can be both comforting and troubling places. This timely book proposes a new understanding of Florence Nightingale’s experiences of domestic life and how ideas of home influenced her writings and pioneering work. From her childhood homes in Derbyshire and Hampshire, she visited the poor sick in their cottages. As a young woman, feeling imprisoned at home, she broke free to become a woman of action, bringing home comforts to the soldiers in the Crimean War and advising the British population on the home front how to create healthier, contagion-free homes. Later, she created Nightingale Homes for nursing trainees and acted as mother-in-chief to her extended family of nurses. These efforts, inspired by her Christian faith and training in human care from religious houses, led to major changes in professional nursing and public health, as Nightingale strove for homely, compassionate care in Britain and around the world. Shedid most of this work from her bed after contracting the debilitating illness, brucellosis, in the Crimea, turning her various private homes into offices and ‘households of faith’. In the year of the bicentenary of her birth, she remains as relevant as ever, achieving an astonishing cultural afterlife.

For a relatively short war, the Crimean War holds an important place in history. Finally, a resource that provides a historical overview of the war from a number of different angles including, the causes, the motivations, the course, and the consequences. This volume fully explores the: o Main engagements o Principal political figures and rulers o Military leaders and naval commanders o Events leading up to the conflict This Dictionary is an excellent window into the political, national, and military intrigue that surrounded one of the most costly campaigns of all time. Includes a chronology, maps, and a comprehensive bibliography full of primary sources, as well as classic sources and histories that will allow researchers to trace the changing perception of the war through history.

Winfried Baumgart's masterful history of the Crimean War has been expanded and fully updated to reflect advances made in the field since the book's first publication. It convincingly argues that if the war had continued after 1856, the First World War would have taken place 60 years earlier, but that fighting ultimately ceased because diplomacy never lost its control over the use of war as an instrument in power politics. With 19 images, 13 maps and additional tables as well as a brand new chapters on 'the medical services', this expanded and fully-updated 2nd edition explores * The origins and diplomacy of the Crimean War * The war aims and general attitudes of the belligerent powers (Russia, France, and Britain), non-belligerent German powers (Austria and Prussia) and a selected number of neutral powers, including the United States * The characteristics and capabilities of the armies involved * The nature of the fighting itself The Crimean War: 1853-1856 examines the conflict in both its Europe-wide and global contexts, moving beyond the five great European powers to consider the role and importance of smaller states and theatres of war that have otherwise been under-served. To this end, it looks at fighting on the Danube front, the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Caucasian battlefield, as well as the White Sea and the Pacific, with final chapters devoted to the Paris peace congress of 1856, the end of the war and its legacy. This book remains the definitive study of one of the most important wars in modern history.

A social history of one of the most tragically botched military campaigns in modern European history--and the most immediate precedent to the American Civil War.

This book is a detailed study of the domestic background of life in the Victorian army. It describes the lives of women who lived on the edge of the regimental community as wives, daughters, prostitutes, lovers and workers. It examines the development of policy on marriage of men in the ranks and discusses the links between the military regulation of marriage and Victorian legislation on prostitution. The early history of the service family and the sources of welfare available to families - the poor law, philanthropy, and the regimental system itself - are examined in the light of attitudes to soldiers' marriages. Women of the Regiment reveals the hitherto unexplored role played by the military in shaping Victorian social policy, domestic ideology and attitudes to sexuality. Its originality lies in its feminist discussions of an institution notorious as a male stronghold; as such it makes a vital contribution to our understanding of the nature of masculinity and women's oppression.