Search results for ""Author Paul Ashdown""

This is the first comprehensive and scholarly account of the story of the young Jesus visiting Britain with Joseph of Arimathea. How did Blake’s lines And did those feet... become a national hymn during the Great War? Meet a fascinating cast of characters including the library assistant who became the first Grand Bard of Cornwall, the author of Onward Christian Soldiers, a mystical gynaecologist and the conqueror of Tibet. Discover the eccentric clergymen and the mad Georgian poet who sought to prove that “The Lord was at Glastonbury”. Paul Ashdown MA read Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Early Celtic, and Archaeology and Anthropology, at Clare College, Cambridge. He has lived in the vales of Avalon for thirty years, writing and lecturing extensively on the Glastonbury mythos.

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Custer’s Last Stand remains one of the most iconic events in American history and culture. Had Custer prevailed at the Little Bighhorn, the victory would have been noteworthy at the moment, worthy of a few newspaper headlines. In defeat, however tactically inconsequential in the larger conflict, Custer became legend. In Inventing Custer: The Making of an American Legend, Edward Caudill and Paul Ashdown bridge the gap between the Custer who lived and the one we’ve immortalized and mythologized into legend. While too many books about Custer treat the Civil War period only as a prelude to the Little Bighorn, Caudill and Ashdown present him as a product of the Civil War, Reconstruction Era, and the Plains Indian Wars. They explain how Custer became mythic, shaped by the press and changing sentiments toward American Indians, and show the many ways the myth has evolved and will continue to evolve as the United States continues to change.

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Confederate Colonel John Singleton Mosby (1833-1916) was only one of a number of heroes to emerge during the Civil War, yet he holds a singular place in the American imagination. He is the irrepressible rebel with a cause, the horseman who emerges from the forest to protect the embattled farmer and his household and bring retribution to the invader. Mosby was the fabled 'Gray Ghost' of the Confederacy, a mythic cavalry officer who operated with virtual impunity behind Union lines near Washington, D.C. Within his lifetime, and continuing to the present, Mosby has been appropriated as a cultural symbol. Mosby has regularly appeared in various genres of popular culture throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, becoming a creation of novelists, poets, Hollywood screenwriters, and biographers. But why has Mosby become a figure of our collective imagination while other heroes of the conflict have not? The Mosby Myth: A Confederate Hero in Life and Legend by Paul Ashdown and Edward Caudill is the first book devoted to explaining Mosby's place in American culture, myth, and legend. Through the story of John Mosby, the authors examine how the Civil War becomes memory, history, and myth through experience, art, and mass communication. The Mosby Myth provides not just a biography of John Mosby's life, but a study of his legacy. Ashdown and Caudill present depictions of Mosby in fiction, cinema, and television, and offer a revealing analysis that explains much about American culture and the way it has been affected by the lingering impact of the Civil War. Well-written and informative, this book is sure to provoke new thought about the effect of the memory of Mosby-and the memory of the Civil War-on American society and culture. The Mosby Myth is an excellent resource for courses on the Civil War.

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