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Uncommon Valour
A military historian presents a provocative study of the Victoria Cross, the heroes it honors, and the ethics of the British honors system. What is the nature of courage? How and when should it be recognized? How has our appreciation of it changed over time? These are among the questions Granville Allen Mawer seeks to answer in this absorbing history of the Victoria Cross, the highest honor awarded to members of the British Armed Forces for valor in the presence of the enemy. Uncommon Valor is both an analytical account of the institution of the Victoria Cross and a fascinating study of the ethics of rewarding bravery. It explores the origin of the award, the rationale behind individual awar...
Incognita
Medieval Europeans imagined the southern hemisphere in terms of folklore, biblical revelation and geographical theory, and the eager expectation of the discovery of rich and fertile landmasses. This book tells the story of invention, purposeful deception and self-deception, and of the discoverers who bit by bit brought the reality home.
Heads and Tales
For some 2700 years we have used them to pay our debts and claim our dues. We have minted trillions of the little metal discs. Even the invention of paper money hardly slowed their proliferation. Indeed, coins made of gold continued to underpin the finances of the world until the twentieth century, but from that eminence the descent has been precipitous. It is safe to predict that sometime in our century coins will cease to circulate as currency. Our pockets will be the lighter but so will our connection to the past. We will have dispensed with something which for half of recorded history has preserved in hard copy, sometimes uniquely, an account of our doings. We should at least say goodbye. This book is a valedictory survey. It follows the story of coins from conception through substance to shadow. Presenting on average a tale for each generation since the beginning, it celebrates the rise and chronicles the demise of a remarkable invention.
Maritime History as Global History
This study aims to provide new insights into the connections between maritime history and global history. It demonstrates the significance of maritime activity as a conduit of global exchange by examining local, national, and international interdependencies and trade networks, and a broad range of time periods, geographical areas, and various sub-divisions of maritime historical research. It is composed of ten essays, with an introductory chapter and concluding chapter. The first five essays discuss the effects globalisation on shipping in the early modern period; the following three discuss maritime transportation and the economics of industrialisation from the nineteenth century to the pre...
South by Northwest
The story of the race between rival nations, the British, French and Americans, to claim Antarctica's holy grail.
John Devoy's Catalpa Expedition
The story of John Devoy’s 1876 Catalpa rescue is a tale of heroism, creativity, and the triumph of independent spirit in pursuit of freedom. The daily log on board the whaling ship Catalpa begins with the typical recount of a crew intact and a spirit unfettered, but such quiet words deceive the truth of the audacious enterprise that came to be known as one of the most important rescues in Irish American history. John Devoy’s men rescued six Irish political prisoners from the Australian coast, allowing millions of fellow Irishmen and American-Fenians, many of whom secretly financed the dangerous plot, to draw courage from the newly exiled prisoners. Philip Fennell and Marie King tell the story from John Devoy’s own records and the ship's logbooks. John Devoy's Catalpa Expedition includes an introduction by Terry Golway and the personal diaries, letters, and reports from John Devoy and his men.
Body at the Melbourne Club
Bertram Armytage, son of a wealthy squatter, a popular sportsman who rowed for Cambridge, was the first Australian-born member of an Antarctic expedition. An expert horseman, he was given charge of the ponies in Ernest Shackleton's great 1907-1909 expedition, narrowly escaping the jaws of killer whales. In London he was decorated by royalty, but on coming home to Australia he went to his part-time city residence, the exclusive Melbourne Club, put on his dinner suit and polar medals and, at the age of 41, shot himself. This mystery-cum-biography provides a new perspective on one of Shackleton's greatest expeditions.
Ochre and Rust
Ochre and Rust offers a fresh perspective on frontier relations between Australian Aboriginal people and European colonists. Nine museum artefacts take the reader into a fascinating zone of encounter and mutual curiosity between collectors and those indigenous people who piqued or responded to their interest. While colonialism is the broad frame, details gleaned from archives, images and the objects themselves reveal a new picture of interaction between individual Aboriginal people and European collectors. Philip Jones explores and makes sense of particular historical moments in colonial history, when Aboriginal people perceived and expected other, more elusive outcomes. Ochre and Rust, an elegantly written challenge to received wisdom about the colonial frontier, has won Australia's inaugural Prime Minister's Award for Literary Non-Fiction.
1789
The world in 1789 stood on the edge of a unique transformation. At the end of an unprecedented century of progress, the fates of three nations—France; the nascent United States; and their common enemy, Britain—lay interlocked. France, a nation bankrupted by its support for the American Revolution, wrestled to seize the prize of citizenship from the ruins of the old order. Disaster loomed for the United States, too, as it struggled, in the face of crippling debt and inter-state rivalries, to forge the constitutional amendments that would become known as the Bill of Rights. Britain, a country humiliated by its defeat in America, recoiled from tales of imperial greed and the plunder of Indi...
Maritime Studies
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