Paul Douglas Lockhart

A biography of the Revolutionary War general, Baron von Steuben--Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin von Steuben--that focuses on his military career, and describes his efforts to create West Point and his contributions to the "Blue Book," which detailed army regulations.

Exploring the history of the kingdom of Denmark at the height of its power and influence in the 16th and 17th centuries, this text uncovers the factors that brought about its domination of northeastern Europe.

"This book considers the role played by Denmark's King Frederik II (1559-1588) in the international diplomacy of the 'age of religious wars'. As Europe's leading Lutheran sovereign, Frederik commanded great influence, his conviction that an international Catholic 'conspiracy' threatened to destroy Protestantism led him to work towards the creation of a Protestant alliance that included both Calvinist and Lutheran states." "Lockhart examines the role of religion in Frederik's foreign policy, the motivations behind the king's alliance-building projects, and the reasons behind the ultimate failure of Frederik's policies. This volume will be of interest to students of early modern diplomacy, sixteenth-century Protestantism, and the Scandinavian monarchies in the early modern period."--Jacket.

This book examines the involvement of Denmark in the Thirty Years' War, a watershed in the history of early modern Europe. Not only did the war permanently alter the European balance of power, but the pressures and demands created by such a prolonged and intensive conflict could not help but have a tremendous impact on the governments, societies, and economies of each of the major participants. Although Denmark, under the leadership of the dynamic King Christian IV (1596-1648) was truly one of Europe's great powers in the early seventeenth century, historians have generally neglected its role in the Thirty Years' War. Denmark's involvement in the war, however, was of vital importance for the anti-Habsburg cause, and it prevented the complete triumph of Catholic and Habsburg forces in the period between the defeat of the Bohemian rebels and the Elector Palatine in the early 1620s and the intervention of Sweden and France in the early 1630s. Lockhart emphasized that the effects of the war on Denmark itself were profound, proving to be a major turning point, primarily in terms of the political order. Prior to Christian's intervention, Denmark was a limited monarchy in which the king shared power equally with the landed aristocracy. Although Denmark was still an elective monarchy when Christian IV died in 1648, the breakdown of the Crown-aristocratic consensus was a necessary precursor to the establishment of absolute monarchy in Denmark in 1660.

Asserts that the Tea Party movement prefers to rewrite the history of the American Revolution as anti-intellectual and antipluralist.

"The history of warfare cannot be fully understood without considering the technology of killing. In Firepower, acclaimed historian Paul Lockhart tells the story of military technology from the Renaissance to the dawn of the atomic era -- five-hundred-year-long "age of firepower" during which the evolution of weaponry transformed the conduct of warfare in the West. Weapons technology had always influenced warfare. But the introduction of gunpowder weapons at the close of the Middle Ages made military technology the largest single factor shaping warfare's tactics, strategy, and logistics. Over the five centuries leading up to World War II, the art of war revolved around the ever-more-effective delivery of firepower, and the driving force of weapons development was the compulsion to make that possible. But for centuries, even as it became more effective, military weaponry remained simple and affordable enough that nearly any state could afford to equip a respectable army; weapons could be used and used again until they physically wore out. That all changed, very suddenly, around 1870. Widespread industrialization and rapid advances in metallurgy and chemistry meant that by the start of World War I, only a handful of great powers could afford to manufacture their own weapons. Revolutions in military technology, in short, triggered a revolution in the structure of power in the West, significantly reducing the number of nations that could act assertively in international politics -- and reducing the others to a condition of permanent subordination. Going beyond the battlefield to consider the profound political and social contexts of armed conflict, Firepower ultimately reveals how the evolution of weapons technology, and the uses to which it has been put, have together transformed human history"--