The months of February and March, 1802 encouraged a fairly peaceful interlude in the Napoleonic Wars between France and (principally) Britain. The British people were sick to…
Author: Dean Swift
‘Dean Swift’ is a pen name: the author has been a soldier; he has worked in sales, TV, the making of films, as a teacher of English and history and a journalist. He is married with three grown-up children. They live in Spain.
From private soldier to King of Sweden: Bernadotte
Born into a French middle-class family in 1763, Jean-Baptiste Jules Bernadotte got into the royal army as a private soldier in 1780 when he was seventeen; as he…
The battle of Austerlitz
Map of the Battle of Austerlitz Anyone living at the beginning of the nineteenth century might have thought that the battle of Trafalgar, fought in October 1805…
Field-Marshal Radetzky
Josef Wenzel, Count of Radetz was born in Austria in 1766. He became a soldier aan fought the Turks at the age of twenty-two in one of…
The Roman emperor who died in Britain
A few of you clever bloggers will deny it, but it is a fair bet that nobody knew that a Roman emperor died in Britain. Everybody knows that…
The Radical Republican Party (PPR) of Spain
Since they were given the chance to do so, the Spanish people have preferred to vote for left-inclined political parties. After the new Constitution of…
The US Supreme Court and homosexual marriage
Just now the US Supreme Court is busy debating the rights and wrongs of legalizing in federal terms the joining together in sacred or civil marriage of…
Popular Myths and the Conspiracy Theory: ‘the stab in the back’ 1918
Learnéd, and sometime not so learnéd people have started myths right down through the centuries almost since the human race was ‘uncivilized’. King Alfred ‘burning the cakes’,…
The Ottoman Empire
Time and again the Ottoman Empire has been mentioned in general-history.com but an in-depth article has so far no been attempted. We will try to remedy that:
Metternich
Of all the great statesmen and diplomats whose many different names have managed to confuse so many history students in the last century or two, this one is…