Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.

What does sound, whether preserved or lost, tell us about nineteenth-century wartime? Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense pursues this question through the many territories affected by the Crimean War, including Britain, France, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Dagestan, Chechnya, and Crimea. Examining the experience of listeners and the politics of archiving sound, it reveals the close interplay between nineteenth-century geographies of empire and the media through which wartime sounds became audible--or failed to do so. The volume explores the dynamics of sound both in violent encounters on the battlefield and in the experience of listeners far-removed from theaters of war, each essay interrogating the Crimean War's sonic archive in order to address a broad set of issues in musicology, ethnomusicology, literary studies, the history of the senses and sound studies.

Infectious disease, wounded and dying soldiers, and a shortage of supplies were the daily realities faced by the nuns who nursed with Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War. This study documents their involvement in the conflict and how the nuns bore witness to the effects of carnage and official indifference, in many cases traumatized as a result. This book reflects on the initiative and courage shown by the nuns and how their actions can be viewed as part of a wider movement among women in the mid-19th century to find fulfilment and assert control in their own lives. Nightingale's Nuns and the Crimean War also sheds light on how critics at the time accused many of the nuns of being secret agents of the Catholic Church who preyed on vulnerable soldier patients; there was a campaign in parliament to regulate and control convents. Terry Tastard shows how the nuns attempted to neutralize this anti-Catholicism, as well as charting the participation of Anglican nuns who had just begun an astonishing project to revive the religious life in the Church of England. Finally the book reveals new insights into Florence Nightingale's relationships with the nuns who nursed with her in Crimea and how these experiences impacted Nightingale's own perspective.

In Moving Home, Sandra Gunning examines nineteenth-century African diasporic travel writing to expand and complicate understandings of the Black Atlantic. Gunning draws on the writing of missionaries, abolitionists, entrepreneurs, and explorers whose work challenges the assumptions that travel writing is primarily associated with leisure or scientific research. For instance, Yoruba ex-slave turned Anglican bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther played a role in the Christianization of colonial Nigeria. Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a formerly enslaved girl "gifted" to Queen Victoria, traveled the African colonies as the wife of a prominent colonial figure and under the protection of her benefactress. Alongside Nancy Gardiner Prince, Martin R. Delany, Robert Campbell, and others, these writers used their mobility as African diasporic and colonial subjects to explore the Atlantic world and beyond while they negotiated the complex intersections between nation and empire. Rather than categorizing them as merely precursors of Pan-Africanist traditions, Gunning traces their successes and frustrations to capture a sense of the historical and geographical specificities that shaped their careers.

In this first history of the military ambulance, historian John S. Haller Jr. documents the development of medical technologies for treating and transporting wounded soldiers on the battlefield. Noting that the word ambulance has been used to refer to both a mobile medical support system and a mode of transport, Haller takes readers back to the origins of the modern ambulance, covering their evolution in depth from the late eighteenth century through World War I. The rising nationalism, economic and imperial competition, and military alliances and arms races of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries figure prominently in this history of the military ambulance, which focuses mainly on British and American technological advancements. Beginning with changes introduced by Dominique-Jean Larrey during the Napoleonic Wars, the book traces the organizational and technological challenges faced by opposing armies in the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, and the Philippines Insurrection, then climaxes with the trench warfare that defined World War I. The operative word is "challenges" of medical care and evacuation because while some things learned in a conflict are carried into the next, too often, the spasms of war force its participants to repeat the errors of the past before acquiring much needed insight. More than a history of medical evacuation systems and vehicles, this exhaustively researched and richly illustrated volume tells a fascinating story, giving readers a unique perspective of the changing nature of warfare in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.