Lame Captains and Left-Handed Admirals

Lame Captains and Left-Handed Admirals PDF Author: Teresa Michals
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813946743
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book

Book Description
Throughout the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy had a peculiar problem: it had too many talented and ambitious officers, all competing for a limited number of command positions. Given this surplus, we might expect that a major physical impairment would automatically disqualify an officer from consideration. To the contrary, after the loss of a limb, at least twenty-six such officers reached the rank of commander or higher through continued service. Losing a limb in battle often became a mark of honor, one that a hero and his friends could use to increase his chances of winning further employment at sea. Lame Captains and Left-Handed Admirals focuses on the lives and careers of four particularly distinguished officers who returned to sea and continued to fight and win battles after losing an arm or a leg: the famous admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, who fought all of his most historically significant battles after he lost his right arm and the sight in one eye, and his lesser-known fellow amputee admirals, Sir Michael Seymour, Sir Watkin Owen Pell, and Sir James Alexander Gordon. Their stories shed invaluable light on the historical effects of physical impairment and this underexamined aspect of maritime history. Peculiar Bodies: Stories and Histories

Lame Captains and Left-Handed Admirals

Lame Captains and Left-Handed Admirals PDF Author: Teresa Michals
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813946743
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book

Book Description
Throughout the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy had a peculiar problem: it had too many talented and ambitious officers, all competing for a limited number of command positions. Given this surplus, we might expect that a major physical impairment would automatically disqualify an officer from consideration. To the contrary, after the loss of a limb, at least twenty-six such officers reached the rank of commander or higher through continued service. Losing a limb in battle often became a mark of honor, one that a hero and his friends could use to increase his chances of winning further employment at sea. Lame Captains and Left-Handed Admirals focuses on the lives and careers of four particularly distinguished officers who returned to sea and continued to fight and win battles after losing an arm or a leg: the famous admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, who fought all of his most historically significant battles after he lost his right arm and the sight in one eye, and his lesser-known fellow amputee admirals, Sir Michael Seymour, Sir Watkin Owen Pell, and Sir James Alexander Gordon. Their stories shed invaluable light on the historical effects of physical impairment and this underexamined aspect of maritime history. Peculiar Bodies: Stories and Histories

Billy Waters Is Dancing

Billy Waters Is Dancing PDF Author: Mary L Shannon
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300267681
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 398

Get Book

Book Description
The story of William Waters, Black street performer in Regency London, and how his huge celebrity took on a life of its own Every child in Regency London knew Billy Waters, the celebrated "King of the Beggars." Likely born into enslavement in 1770s New York, he became a Royal Navy sailor. After losing his leg in a fall from the rigging, the talented and irrepressible Waters became London's most famous street performer. His extravagantly costumed image blazed across the stage and in print to an unprecedented degree. For all his contemporary renown, Waters died destitute in 1823--but his legend would live on for decades. Mary L. Shannon's biography draws together surviving traces of Waters' life to bring us closer to the historical figure underlying them. Considering Waters' influence on the London stage and his echoing resonances in visual art, and writing by Douglass, Dickens, and Thackeray, Shannon asks us to reconsider Black presences in nineteenth-century popular culture. This is a vital attempt to recover a life from historical obscurity--and a fascinating account of what it meant to find fame in the Regency metropolis.

Melville’s Other Lives

Melville’s Other Lives PDF Author: Christopher Sten
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813945453
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book

Book Description
Melville’s Other Lives is the first book-length study on The Piazza Tales—Herman Melville’s only authorized collection of short fiction published in his lifetime—and the first book to explore the rich and varied subject of embodiment in any published collection of Melville’s stories. As Christopher Sten shows, all of the stories in The Piazza Tales present encounters between established white male figures: a writer, a lawyer, a ship captain, a homeowner, an architect, a world traveler, and characters who are outsiders, minorities, outcasts, or "others": a seamstress, an office drudge, enslaved Africans, a traveling salesman, island castaways, the poor. In each, Melville concentrates on the trials of the human body, its pain and trauma, its struggles and frustrations. Some tales concern common trials such as illness or invalidism ("The Piazza"), the tedium of office work ("Bartleby"), or the aggravation of door-to-door salesmen ("The Lightning-Rod Man"). Others concern extraordinary trials: the traumatic violence of a rebellion on a slave ship ("Benito Cereno"), the hardships of surviving on a wasteland archipelago ("The Encantadas"), the perils of creating a monstrous "man-machine" ("The Bell-Tower"). In their concern for the cultural meanings of such trials, Melville’s stories look forward to the work of Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, and other cultural materialists who have shown how cultures define, control, and oppress bodies based on their otherness. As a storyteller, Melville understood how such cultural dynamics operate and seized on our collective obsession with the human body as subject, symbol, and vehicle to dramatize his tales.

Vital Organs

Vital Organs PDF Author: Suzie Edge
Publisher: Wildfire
ISBN: 1035404591
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book

Book Description
The remarkable stories of the world's most famous body parts. Louis XIV's rear end inspired the British National Anthem. Queen Victoria's armpit led to the development of antiseptics. Robert Jenkin's ear started a war. All too often, historical figures feel distant and abstract; more myth and legend than real flesh and blood. These stories of bodies and its parts remind us that history's most-loved, and most-hated, were real breathing creatures who inhabited organs and limbs just like us - until they're cut off that is. Medical historian Dr Suzie Edge investigates over 40 cases of how we've used, abused, dug up, displayed, experimented on, and worshipped body parts, including why Percy Shelley's heart refused to burn; how Yao Niang's toes started a 1000 year long ritual; why a giant's bones are making us rethink medical ethics; and the strange case of Hitler's right testicle.

The Left-handed Monkey Wrench

The Left-handed Monkey Wrench PDF Author: Richard McKenna
Publisher: US Naval Institute Press
ISBN:
Category : Ocean
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book

Book Description
Selections from the author's uncompleted second novel and stories about a lonely warrant officer, a crafty sailor, and a proud engineer are accompanied by essays about historical research and naval life and reform.

Fabulous Admirals and Some Naval Fragments

Fabulous Admirals and Some Naval Fragments PDF Author: Geoffrey L. Lowis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Admirals
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Get Book

Book Description


A Collection of Voyages and Travels, Some Now First Printed from Original Manuscripts. Others Translated Out of Foreign Languages and Now First Publish'd in English,... In Four Volumes. With a General Preface,... The Whole Illustrated with a Great Number of Useful Maps, and Cuts All Engraved on Copper,...

A Collection of Voyages and Travels, Some Now First Printed from Original Manuscripts. Others Translated Out of Foreign Languages and Now First Publish'd in English,... In Four Volumes. With a General Preface,... The Whole Illustrated with a Great Number of Useful Maps, and Cuts All Engraved on Copper,... PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 1020

Get Book

Book Description


Waters of Potowmack

Waters of Potowmack PDF Author: Paul C. Metcalf
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813920429
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book

Book Description
Waters of Potowmack is a documentary history of the Potomac River and its wide, fertile basin--the setting for much of early United States history. A collage of primary accounts, it extends from the first explorers and colonists, the building of the Capitol, and the incidents of the Civil War through our recent past. Waters of Potowmack records the firsthand impressions of the settlers and surveyors of this river basin, an area that includes parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. In addition to offering an introduction to the geography, geology, and climate of the region, Metcalf's fascinating pastiche includes early descriptions of flora and fauna, and accounts of some of the earliest encounters between European settlers and indigenous peoples. Here, too, are the voices of Washington and Jefferson, of Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln, as well as the lesser-known stories of revolutionaries, mercenaries, and canal and road builders. And from diary and journal entries we follow the correspondence between Washington, Jefferson, and L'Enfant as they lay out the new Federal City. Selections from Civil War diaries focus on key battle sites, and primary accounts offer a new understanding of the motives of John Brown and John Wilkes Booth. The last section of Metcalf's engrossing book looks at the ruinous pollution of the river basin after the Second World War, at the rioting and looting of the 1960s, and at the despoliation of a land that at the book's beginning was described as an Eden, a paradise on earth. An evocative and moving book, this is a history of exploring, settling, rebelling, governing, rioting, building, and cultivating, all on the "waters of Potowmack."

Cobbett's Parliamentary History of England: 1688-1702

Cobbett's Parliamentary History of England: 1688-1702 PDF Author: Great Britain. Parliament
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 848

Get Book

Book Description


The Parliamentary Debates

The Parliamentary Debates PDF Author: Great Britain. Parliament
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 856

Get Book

Book Description