Shortly before the United States declared war on Great Britain in June 1812, Congress came within two votes of declaring war on Napoleon Bonaparte's French empire. For six years, France and Britain had both seized American shipping. While common wisdom says that America was virtually an innocent in this matter, caught in the middle of the epic wars between France and Britain, Peter Hill has uncovered a far more complex and interesting history. French privateers and Napoleon's navy were seizing American merchant ships in a concerted attempt to disrupt Britain's commerce. American ships were the principal carriers of British goods to the continent, and Napoleon believed his best, and perhaps only, hope to defeat Britain was to cut off that market. While the French emperor sought an accommodation with America, the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison continually frustrated him. American diplomatic fumbling sent mixed messages, and American neutrality policies, Hill finds, were more punishing to France than to Britain. Always interested in lucrative ventures, American merchant ships also became the main suppliers of food to British forces fighting Napoleon in Spain and Portugal. By 1812, the United States was on a collision course with both Britain and France over clashes on the high seas, and war with two major powers at once might have proven disastrous for the young United States. Hill's engaging narrative details the fascinating history of America's troubled relationship with Napoleon and how this crisis with France was finally averted.

The definitive biography of Napoleon -- hailed as "magnificent" by The Economist. "What a novel my life has been!" Napoleon once said of himself. Born into a poor family, the callow young man was, by twenty-six, an army general. Seduced by an older woman, his marriage transformed him into a galvanizing military commander. The Pope crowned him as Emperor of the French when he was only thirty-five. Within a few years, he became the effective master of Europe, his power unparalleled in modern history. His downfall was no less dramatic. The story of Napoleon has been written many times. In some versions, he is a military genius, in others a war-obsessed tyrant. Here, historian Adam Zamoyski cuts through the mythology and explains Napoleon against the background of the European Enlightenment, and what he was himself seeking to achieve. This most famous of men is also the most hidden of men, and Zamoyski dives deeper than any previous biographer to find him. Beautifully written, Napoleon brilliantly sets the man in his European context.

This book is suitable for children age 9 and above. Napoleon Bonaparte was the first emperor of France. He was a very successful military general and he led his army into many victorious battles. This is the story of how a lawyer's son rose to become a powerful emperor.

When we think of Napoleon, no names of trusty right-hand men jump to mind. Woloch (history, Columbia U., New York City) sets out to correct this in his study, which introduces the men that aided Napoleon's creation of a dictatorship. He does this through a series of narratives of key events and themes. He concludes with chapters on the routines of governance; difficult issues for Napoleon's liberal servitors of the un-liberal practices of preventive detention and censorship; and what happened to his minions following the Empire's collapse, the Bourbon Restoration, and Napoleon's return from Elba in 1815. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

“Sears has finally unraveled the mystique of this complex, brilliant Civil War general . . . A fascinating story” (James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom). “Commander of the Northern army in the Civil War, Gen. George McClellan saw himself as God’s chosen instrument for saving the Union. Self-aggrandizing, with a streak of arrogant stubbornness, he set himself above President Lincoln, whom he privately called ‘the Gorilla.’ To ‘the young Napoleon,’ as McClellan’s troops dubbed him, abolition was an ‘accursed doctrine.’ Fond of conspiracy plots, he insisted that the Lincoln administration had traitorously conspired to set him up for military defeat. Although he constantly anticipated one big, decisive battle that would crush the South, he squandered one military opportunity after another, and, if Sears is correct, he was the worst strategist the Army of the Potomac ever had. Based on primary sources, letters, dispatch books, diaries, newspapers, this masterly biography is an astonishing portrait of an egotistical crank who could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.” —Publishers Weekly “Engagingly written and thoroughly researched, Sears’s persuasive critique is the best and most complete biography of this controversial general.” —Library Journal “The best biography of McClellan ever published. Sears uses intensive research, including new material, to document the tormented, wasted military career of a talented man . . . The enigma of McClellan has never been explained so well . . . Historians should be grateful.” —The Washington Post Book World

The War of 1812 was one of a cluster of events that left unsettled what is often referred to as the Revolutionary settlement. At once postcolonial and neoimperial, the America of 1812 was still in need of definition. As the imminence of war intensified the political, economic, and social tensions endemic to the new nation, Americans of all kinds fought for country on the battleground of culture. The War of 1812 increased interest in the American democratic project and elicited calls for national unity, yet the essays collected in this volume suggest that the United States did not emerge from war in 1815 having resolved the Revolution's fundamental challenges or achieved a stable national identity. The cultural rifts of the early republican period remained vast and unbridged. Contributors: Brian Connolly, University of South Florida Anna Mae Duane, University of Connecticut Duncan Faherty, Queens College, CUNY James M. Greene, Pittsburg State University Matthew Rainbow Hale, Goucher College Jonathan Hancock, Hendrix College Tim Lanzendoerfer, University of Mainz Karen Marrero, Wayne State University Nathaniel Millett, St. Louis University Christen Mucher, Smith College Dawn Peterson, Emory University Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, University of Michigan David Waldstreicher, The Graduate Center, CUNY Eric Wertheimer, Arizona State University

The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon is built around a bizarre historical event and an off-hand challenge. The event? In December 1840, nearly twenty years after his death, the remains of Napoleon were returned to Paris for burial—and the next day, the director of a Paris hospital for the insane admitted fourteen men who claimed to be Napoleon. The challenge, meanwhile, is the claim by great French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne-Dominique Esquirol (1772–1840) that he could recount the history of France through asylum registries. From those two components, Laure Murat embarks on an exploration of the surprising relationship between history and madness. She uncovers countless stories of patients whose delusions seem to be rooted in the historical or political traumas of their time, like the watchmaker who believed he lived with a new head, his original having been removed at the guillotine. In the troubled wake of the Revolution, meanwhile, French physicians diagnosed a number of mental illnesses tied to current events, from “revolutionary neuroses” and “democratic disease” to the “ambitious monomania” of the Restoration. How, Murat asks, do history and psychiatry, the nation and the individual psyche, interface? A fascinating history of psychiatry—but of a wholly new sort—The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon offers the first sustained analysis of the intertwined discourses of madness, psychiatry, history, and political theory.