Search results for ""Author William Nester""

Britain alone could not hope to defeat the might of Napoleonic France which, through enforced conscription, had become a nation in arms. But British leaders had a long history of forging alliances to counter their rivals and when revolution ravaged France in 1793 and a lev e en masse raised a huge patriotic army, it was through a coalition of monarchies that French ambitions were restrained - a coalition made possible by British gold and British industry. When Napoleon seized the reins of power in France, he too introduced conscription and, once again, it was a succession of British led and funded coalitions which eventually brought Napoleon to his knees. During the years 1793 to 1815, the British Government formed and underwrote seven coalitions that cost Britain 1,657,854,518 as the national debt tripled from 290,000,000 to 860,000,00\. Of that, British subsidies to around thirty allies amounted to 65,830,228, along with staggering amounts of war supplies mass produced by British factories and shipped to allies. Britain's leading role in Europe did not end with Waterloo. Immediately following the Sixth Coalition, and amidst the Seventh Coalition, Britain constructed, with the other great powers, a security system of cooperation and consultation called the Concert of Europe' that prevented a serious war among them for two generations. Britain's power to underwrite those coalitions came from a related series of revolutions - agrarian, mercantile, financial, technological, manufacturing, cultural, and political that developed over the proceeding century. For many reasons that happened in Britain and not elsewhere. Of them, cultural values may be most crucial. Constraints were fewer and incentives greater for enterprising Britons to invest, invent, buy, and sell in ways that enriched themselves and their nation more than elsewhere. During the eighteenth century, Britain's leaders mastered a virtuous power cycle of victorious wars, expanding production, captured territories and markets, and more income. During a speech before Congress in December 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called on Americans to be an arsenal of democracy' to aid Britain and other countries threatened by the imperialistic fascist powers. Britain played exactly the same role during the Napoleonic era. The Coalitions Against Napoleon explores how Britain developed and asserted the financial, manufacturing, and military power to achieve that goal.

Read more less

The Civil War fascinates Americans like no other war in their history. Many Americans are still fighting some of the war's issues in an Odyssey that stretches back to the first settlement and will persist until the end of time. The war itself was an Iliad of brilliant generals like Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan for the Union, or Lee, Jackson, and Forrest for the Confederacy; epic battles like Gettysburg and Chickamauga; epic sieges like Vicksburg and Petersburg; and epic naval combats such as Monitor versus Merrimack, or Kearsarge versus Alabama. It was America's most horrific war, with more dead than all others combined. Around 625,000 soldiers and 125,000 civilians died from various causes, bringing the total to 750,000 people. Of 31 million Americans, 2.1 million northerners and 880,000 southerners donned uniforms. Why did eleven states eventually ban together to rebel against the United States? President Jefferson Davis began an answer when he said: If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone, Died of a Theory.' That theory justified the enslavement of blacks by whites as a natural right and duty of a superior race over an inferior race; a theory, it was believed, that morally and economically elevated both races. Although slavery was the Civil War's core cause, there were related chronic conflicts over the nature of government, citizenship, liberty, property, equality, wealth, race, identity, justice, crime, voting, power, and history - some of which issues have never entirely gone away. America's Unending Civil War is unique among thousands of books on the subject. None before has explored the Civil War's related and enduring conflicts of ideas and principles through four centuries of a nation's history.

Read more less

Many indeed, are the biographies of Winston Churchill, one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century. But what was that influence and how did he use it in the furtherance of his and his country's ambitions? For the first time, Professor William Nestor has delved into the life and actions of Churchill to examine just how skillfully he manipulated events to placed him in positions of power. His thirst for power stirred political controversy wherever he intruded. Those who had to deal directly with him either loved or hated him. His enemies condemned him for being an egoist, publicity hound, double-dealer, and Machiavellian, accusations that his friends and even he himself could not deny. He could only serve Britain as a statesman and a reformer because he was a wily politician who won sixteen of twenty-one elections that he contested between 1899 and 1955. The House of Commons was Churchill's political temple where he exalted in the speeches and harangues on the floor and the backroom horse-trading and comradery. Most of his life he was a Cassandra, warning against the threats of Communism, Nazism, and nuclear Armageddon. With his ability to think beyond mental boxes and connect far-flung dots, he clearly foretold events to which virtually everyone else was oblivious. Yet he was certainly not always right and was at times spectacularly wrong. This is the first book that explores how Churchill understood and asserted the art of power, mostly through hundreds of his own insights expressed through his speeches and writings.

Read more less

With his elfin poker face, receding short golden hair, diminutive but muscular body, and stiff clipped gait, Vladimir Putin is among the world's most recognizable leaders. He has tightly ruled Russia since 31 December 1999, and will firmly assert power from the Kremlin for the foreseeable future. Many fear and loath him for his brutality, for ordering opponents imprisoned on trumped up charges and even murdered. Yet most Russians adore him for rebuilding the economy, state authority, and national pride. What drives Putin? Much more than greed for money and power animates him. He is a zealous nationalist deadset to make Russia great again. He mourns the Soviet Union's breakup as the greatest political catastrophe of the twentieth century.' Putin's nostalgia is understandable. The Russian empire peaked in territory, population, military power, and prestige when it was called the Soviet Union. Putin has mastered the art of power. Depending on what is at stake, that involves the deft wielding of appropriate or smart' ingredients of hard' physical power like armoured divisions, multinational corporations, and assassins, and soft' psychological power like diplomats, honey-traps, cyber-trolls, and fake news factories to defeat threats and seize opportunities. Russian hackers penetrated the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton's campaign organization, extracted tens of thousands of potentially embarrassing emails, and posted them on WikiLeaks. As the Kremlin's latest ruler Putin, like most of his predecessors, is as realistic as he is ruthless. He knows the limits of Russian hard and soft power while constantly trying to expand them. He is doing whatever he can to advance Russian national interests as he interprets them. In Putin's mind, Russia can rise only as far as the West can fall. And on multiple fronts he is methodically advancing to those ends. Putin's Virtual War reveals just how and why he does so, and the dire consequences for America, Europe, and the world beyond.

Read more less

From 1789 to 1800, the Federalist and Republican parties held opposing visions for America's future.

Read more less

After their independence and civil wars, Americans never faced a greater threat than the sixteen years of global depression followed by global war from 1929 to 1945. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the president for the last dozen of those years, during which he led the nation first to alleviate the Great Depression then led an international alliance that vanquished the fascist powers during the Second World War. Along the way, he established the modern presidency with centralized powers to make and implement domestic and foreign policies. He was naturally a master politician who eventually, through daunting trials and errors, became an accomplished statesman. For all that, historians regularly rank Roosevelt among the top three presidents. Yet, most historians and countless others criticize Roosevelt for an array of things that he did or failed to do. Conservatives lambast him for creating a welfare state and trying to pack federal courts with liberal judges while liberals condemn him

Read more less

As William Nester asserts in The Age of Jackson, it takes quite a leader to personify an age. A political titan for thirty-three years (18151848), Andrew Jackson possessed character, beliefs, and acts that dominated American politics.

Read more less

Haunted Victory: The American Crusade to Destroy Saddam and Impose Democracy on Iraq explores the dynamic trajectory of beliefs, actions, and their consequences in what will forever be debated as among the most controversial and costly operations in U.S. history in terms of security, power, wealth, and honor.

Read more less

War in Europe began with the first human migrants. Rival bands fought for thousands of years before the Greeks and Romans began writing about their military history, first as legend—for instance, the hero Achilles battling the Trojans—and then as fact. War developed from sticks and stones to bronze, iron, and steel, including armor and edged weapons. Then came gunpowder, guns, and cannons, which eventually replaced edged weapons. Finally, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, technology exploded: railroads, steamships, telegraphs, machine guns, automobiles, airplanes, and tanks enabled European states to muster, equip, arm, transport, and command more men than ever before, with more firepower than ever before. In the past seventy-five years, atomic weapons changed the military landscape of Europe—as have the internet and cyber warfare. In this colorful new telling of European warfare—and indeed European history through the continent’s all too numerous wars and conflicts—William Nester describes millennia of armed conflict. He covers the “greatest hits” of military history both ancient and current: Thermopylae, the Peloponnesian War, the wars of the Roman Empire across the continent, the Battle of Hastings, the Crusades, Agincourt, Waterloo, Napoleon and Wellington, the Somme, the Spanish Civil War, Stalingrad and Normandy, Churchill, Hitler, and Stalin, Bosnia, and up through Putin’s attempts to redraw the map of Europe. Nester highlights how warfare has been deeply entwined with European statesmanship and undergirds modern institutions such as NATO and the European Union. Europe’s sense of itself is bound up in its military history. Land of War is an epic odyssey from Europe’s mythic origins through its latest violent conflicts.

Read more less

No one in history has provoked more controversy than Napoleon Bonaparte. Was he an enlightened ruler or brutal tyrant? Was he an insatiable warmonger or a defender of France against the aggression of the other great powers. Was he kind or cruel, farsighted or blinkered, a sophisticate or a philistine, a builder or a destroyer? Napoleon was at once all that his partisans laud, his enemies condemn, and much more. He remains fascinating, both because he so dramatically changed the course of history and had such a complex, paradoxical character. One thing is certain, if the art of leadership is about getting what one wants, then Napoleon was among history's greatest masters. He understood and asserted the dynamic relationship among military, economic, diplomatic, technological, cultural, psychological, and thus political power. War was the medium through which he was able to demonstrate his innate skills, leading his armies to victories across Europe. He overthrew France's corrupt republican government in a coup then asserted near dictatorial powers. Those powers were then wielded with great dexterity in transforming France from feudalism to modernity with a new law code, canals, roads, ports, schools, factories, national bank, currency, and standard weights and measures. With those successes, he convinced the Senate to proclaim him France's emperor and even got the pope to preside over his coronation. He reorganized swaths of Europe into new states and placed his brothers and sisters on the thrones. This is Napoleon as has never been seen before. No previous book has explored deeper or broader into his seething labyrinth of a mind and revealed more of its complex, fascinating, provocative, and paradoxical dimensions. Napoleon has never before spoken so thoroughly about his life and times through the pages of a book, nor has an author so deftly examined the veracity or mendacity of his words. Within are dimensions of Napoleon that may charm, appall, or perplex, many buried for two centuries and brought to light for the first time. _Napoleon and the Art of Leadership_ is a psychologically penetrating study of the man who had such a profound effect on the world around him that the entire era still bears his name.

Read more less