A cultural, military and imperial history of the Black soldiers of Britain's West India Regiments.

"This book examines the place and status of the Black soldiers of the British Army's West India Regiments from the late eighteenth century until their disbandment in 1927. Analysing their depiction in word and image, it sheds important new light on debates about race, Britishness and military service"--

This book offers the first encounter between labour history and military history, with an analysis of the working lives of nineteenth British rank and file soldiers in the context of a developing working class industrial culture and in its interaction with British society.

Dramatic and taut, this is the heartrending true story of a soldier in post-World War I France who has lost his memory and identity. When his picture is published, hundreds of "relatives" who have lost men in the war come forward to claim the unknown soldier.

Young Continental soldiers carried a heavy burden in the American Revolution. Their experiences of coming of age during the upheavals of war provide a novel perspective on the Revolutionary era, eliciting questions of gender, family life, economic goals, and politics. "Going for a soldier" forced young men to confront profound uncertainty, and even coercion, but also offered them novel opportunities. Although the war imposed obligations on youths, military service promised young men in their teens and early twenties alternate paths forward in life. Continental soldiers’ own youthful expectations about respectable manhood and their goals of economic competence and marriage not only ordered their experience of military service; they also shaped the fighting capacities of George Washington’s army and the course of the war. Becoming Men of Some Consequence examines how young soldiers and officers joined the army, their experiences in the ranks, their relationships with civilians, their choices about quitting long-term military service, and their attempts to rejoin the flow of civilian life after the war. The book recovers young soldiers’ perspectives and stories from military records, wartime letters and journals, and postwar memoirs and pension applications, revealing how revolutionary political ideology intertwined with rational calculations and youthful ambitions. Its focus on soldiers as young men offers a new understanding of the Revolutionary War, showing how these soldiers’ generational struggle for their own independence was a profound force within America’s struggle for its independence.

When 16 year-old Joseph Donaldson announced to his parents in 1809 that he had 'gone for a soldier', they were understandably horrified, given the bleak and uncertain prospects facing their beloved son, of whom they had such high hopes. Donaldson was an educated lad who would probably have made his way in the world had he not decided to join the army. Fortunately for his parents -- and, indeed, ourselves -- Donaldson returned safe and sound at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and within a few years of his return put pen to paper to record his account of his adventures in that most glorious of British campaigns, the Peninsular War, fought between 1808 and 1814. Donaldson's lot was pretty much that of many other soldiers; tough, demanding, at times extremely unpleasant and life-threatening, but he bore it all well considering his very young age. That he did so is born out by the fact that by the time he left the army he was a sergeant, no mean achievement for somebody in the uncompromising ranks of the British army of the early 19th century. The end result of Donaldson's writings was his wonderfully graphic, gripping and often poignant memoir, the Recollections of the Eventful Life of a Soldier, reproduced here for the first time since 1852, along with his two other works, The War in the Peninsula and Scenes and Sketches in Ireland. In them, Donaldson writes with great skill of his experiences in Portugal, Spain and the south of France, serving with Wellington's army as it fought its way through the Peninsula. His account includes such episodes as Massena's retreat from Portugal, the storming of Ciudad Rodrigo, the storming and sacking of the fortress of Badajoz (a really gripping piece), the battles of Salamanca, Vittoria, the Pyrenees, the invasion of France and the battles of Orthes and Toulouse, all of which Donaldson witnessed as a soldier in the ranks of Sir Thomas Picton's 'Fighting' 3rd Division, the toughest division in Wellington's army. This is a classic book which ranks amongst the most graphic and enjoyable of the many memoirs of the Peninsular War. -- Dust jacket.