Norwich University creates online infographic on significant naval battles

Check out this interesting infographic, titled “The Largest Naval Sea Battles in Military History,” which presents some facts related to some of the most important battles in naval history. It is a big image, but you can share it on the various social media as well. Norwich University is a pretty good school and offers an online Master of Arts in Military History geared for working professionals looking to advance their historical knowledge.

Norwich University Master of Arts in Military History Online

Book Review of The Great Elector

Interesting study about Frederick William, the Great Elector of Brandenburg-Prussia, and his involvement in seventeenth-century wars.

International History

Derek McKay. The Great Elector. Profiles in Power series. Harlow, England: Longman, 2001. ISBN 978-0-582-49482-4. Notes. Maps. Tables. Chronology. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xiii, 286. £16.99 (paperback).

Dr Derek McKay, retired Senior Lecturer in International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, provides an outstanding biography of Frederick William of Hohenzollern.  McKay is known for his published doctoral thesis Allies of Convenience: Diplomatic Relations between Great Britain and Austria, 1714-1719 (1986), important studies Prince Eugene of Savoy (1977) and The Rise of the Great Powers, 1648-1815 (co-authored with Hamish M. Scott) (1983),  along with journal articles on diplomatic history in the early eighteenth century.

Frederick William ruled over Brandenburg-Prussia for forty-eight years.  At his accession in 1640, Frederick William became the Margrave and Elector over the scattered Hohenzollern lands that were devastated in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and occupied by Swedish forces.  He immediately negotiated an armistice with Sweden, and…

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The Italian Wars 1494-1559

Skulking in Holes and Corners

So what do you do if you teach a variety of early modern European courses over and over (in this case, Reformation Europe, European Warfare 1337-1815, Religion War and Peace in Early Modern Europe), need to quickly get up to speed on the narrative every time you teach it, and fancy yourself a visualizer of historical information? Something like this:

A bit of overkill, perhaps, but I’ve always liked my data dense. I’ve shared otherexamples of my timecharts before, and this is a more recent version of my overview of the Italian Wars (Wars of Italy if you prefer) in all their nauseating complexity. A topic, it so happens, that I’m covering in class today.

To slightly repeat myself from my earlier posts: this cheatsheet combines information on the names of the wars, their chronology, the combatants involved in any given year, the alliances, the rulers, and the main…

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Book Review of Guarding the Frontier: Ottoman Border Forts and Garrisons in Europe

International History

Mark L. Stein. Guarding the Frontier: Ottoman Border Forts and Garrisons in Europe. London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007. ISBN 978-1-84511-301-8. Tables. Map. Gazetteer. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. Pp. vii, 222. $90.00 (hardcover).

In 1526, the Ottoman Sultan Süleyman I (the Magnificent) (ruled 1520-1566) destroyed the Kingdom of Hungary at the battle of Mohács.  Three years later, in 1529, the Ottomans besieged but failed to take Emperor Charles V’s capital city of Vienna.  The Austrian Habsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire took up the responsibility to defend Christian Europe from the Ottoman threat.  The Habsburg-Ottoman frontier would be contested over for many centuries.  In this study Dr Mark L. Stein, Associate Professor of History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, examines Ottoman fortresses and garrisons from the end of the Habsburg-Ottoman Long War (1593-1606) through the Austro-Turkish War of 1663-1664 to the outbreak of the Great Turkish War or War of the Holy League (1683-1699).  The study is…

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Book Review of The Projection and Limitations of Imperial Powers, 1618-1850

International History

Frederick C. Schneid, editor. The Projection and Limitations of Imperial Powers, 1618-1850. History of Warfare series. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2012. ISBN 978-90-04-22671-5. Notes. Index. Pp. xiv, 224. $144.00 (hardcover).

Dr Frederick C. Schneid, Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at High Point University, presents a collection of essays from the Gunther E. Rothenberg Seminars in Military History held at High Point University in North Carolina.  Schneid is a historian of the Napoleonic Wars and Wars of Italian Independence.  His studies include Soldiers of Napoleon’s Kingdom of Italy: Army, State and Society, 1800-1815 (1995), Napoleon’s Italian Campaigns, 1805-1815 (2002), and Napoleon’s Conquest of Europe: The War of the Third Coalition (2005), Napoleonic Wars (2012), and The Second War of Italian Unification, 1859-1861 (2012).

This collection of essays explores the common issue of projection and limitations of imperial powers by European states and the United States from the Thirty…

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