What if Napoleon Bonaparte had escaped from St. Helena and wound up in the United States? The year is 1821. Former French Emperor Napoleon has been imprisoned on a dark wart in the Atlantic since his defeat at Waterloo in 1815. Rescued in a state of near-death by Gulf pirate Jean Laffite, Napoleon lands in New Orleans, where he struggles to regain his health aided by voodoo priestess Marie Laveau. Opponents of the Bourbon regime expect him to reconquer France. French Canadians beg him to seize Canada from Britain. American adventurers urge him to steal Texas from Mexico. His brother Joseph pleads with him to settle peacefully in New Jersey. As Napoleon restlessly explores his new land, he frets about his legacy. He fears for the future of his ten-year-old son, trapped in the velvet fetters of the Austrian court. While the British, French and American governments follow his activities with growing alarm, remnants of the Grande Armee flock to him with growing anticipation. Are Napoleon's intentions as peaceful as he says they are? If not, does he still have the qualities necessary to lead a winning campaign? If you enjoy alternate history or 19th century historical fiction, Napoleon in America is for you."

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.

Winner of the 2009 Literary Award, sponsored by the International Napoleonic Society/La Societe Napoleonienne Internationale of Montreal, Quebec's Literary Committee Napoleon's last campaign didn't end at Waterloo. After that fateful day on June 1815, hundreds if not thousands of veterans of Napoleon's army emigrated to America. Many went farther south and joined the rebels fighting for independence in the Spanish colonies, from Mexico to Buenos Aires. The Bonapartists roiled the Western World as they sought fortune, fame, and glory in the expanding United States and in the tumultuous Spanish Americas suffering from repression and civil disorder, and even in the states of Europe. They were joined by adventurers from other nations who shared their admiration for the fallen emperor. This is the first full-length examination of the Bonapartists who emigrated from France after Napoleon's defeat and exile, who formed a loose confederation with adventurers and romantics, and who contemplated a new empire in the Western Hemisphere. The scheme had the support and encouragement of the fallen emperor himself and his brother Joseph, former King of Spain, who lived in exile in the United States. Emilio Ocampo has examined archives on three continents and sources in several languages to ferret out the evidence--a monumental task considering that conspirators tried to leave no evidence of their plans, and that a failed plot, like failure in general, leaves few claimants. Ocampo reinterprets Latin American independence as an international event that drew in all the major powers. By illuminating the complex connections between the shattered France of the Bourbon restoration; an England threatened by radical politician inspired by the French Revolution; Napoleon in exile at St. Helena; the United States, where home-grown adventurers and French émigrés alike saw opportunity; and the collapsing Spanish colonial empire, where revolutionaries were allying themselves with the veterans of Napoleon's Grande Armée, Ocampo brings together two bodies of scholarship: Napoleonic history and Latin American independence. He does so by tracing the steps of four of the most fascinating characters of the era: two Britons disaffected with their own government--Lord Thomas Cochrane and Sir Robert Wilson--and two former generals of Napolean's army named Charles Lallemand and Michel Brayer. The Emperor's Last Campaign is a fascinating story, well told, and peopled with all sorts of improbable characters and schemes that perhaps just missed coming to full fruition but that in the process contributed to one of the most important events of the nineteenth century: the breakdown of the Spanish empire in America and the rise of the United States as a world power.

The way an army thinks about and understands warfare has a tremendous impact on its organization, training, and operations. The central ideas of that understanding form a nation's way of warfare that influences decisions on and off the battlefield. From the disasters of the War of 1812, Winfield Scott ensured that America adopted a series of ideas formed in the crucible of the Wars of the French Revolution and epitomized by Napoleon. Reflecting American cultural changes, these French ideas dominated American warfare on the battlefields of the Mexican-American War, the American Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I. America remained committed to these ideas until cultural pressures and the successes of German Blitzkrieg from 1939 - 1940 led George C. Marshall to orchestrate the adoption of a different understanding of warfare. Michael A. Bonura examines concrete battlefield tactics, army regulations, and theoretical works on war as they were presented in American army education manuals, professional journals, and the popular press, to demonstrate that as a cultural construction, warfare and ways of warfare can be transnational and influence other nations.

Inès Murat’s readable and entertaining narrative introduces us to little-known facts about the adventures and misadventures of numerous French veterans of Waterloo who migrated to the United States. More often than not, their visions of life in this country conflicted with the original New World dream of the peaceful pioneer. For two centuries, the lure of what we now call the American Dream had beckoned rich and poor from the Old World. “In all respects,” said Napoleon, “America was our true refuge.” Reported by Las Cases in the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, this statement signifies only one phase of the connections between the Emperor and the United States. Anecdotes and incisive portraits of numerous Bonapartists who came to America vividly portray the complex intermeshing between the Emperor and the United States. Anecdotes and incisive portraits of numerous Bonapartists who came to America vividly portray the complex intermeshing between the ideals of the French Revolution and the new forms of freedom that had been born in America. These dramatic accounts bring to the foreground of history the impact of two world views—that of the Old World, sheltered in the shadow of Napoleon’s belief in historical destiny, and that of the New World, more experimental and industrious. The clash produced a resounding din in the Napoleonic epoch, for which Napoleon and the American Dream traces new routes and relationships between two cultures.