Dissertations and databases: The historian as software engineer

This article argues that historians have always been closer to programmers than has perhaps been recognized, and that historical software projects undertaken within the framework of the traditional third‐year dissertation are useful training not just for the potential historian, but also for the potential software engineer

“Known to be Equal to the Management”: The Modernising Planter and the Enslaved Overseer

Enslaved overseers have largely been neglected in the extant historiography of plantation slavery. At best they have been pushed to the margins of in the literature, their numbers and their significance downplayed. Yet, as large plantations diversified over the latter years of the eighteenth century, and as relations between established planters and independently minded and aspirational white overseers became prone to mistrust and friction, many prominent modernising planters, including both Washington and Jefferson, began to experiment with unfree managers. They often proved to be skilled, dependable and, even under the pressure of the Revolutionary War, resilient. Yet their presence raised serious questions within plantation society too; they challenged white racial hegemony, and their ‘loyalty’ was a conditional and contingent quality. They occupy a unique place in the story of plantation management, one that challenges orthodox conceptions of race and power in the slave South

“Technology, ‘Machine Age’ Warfare, and the Military Use of Dogs, 1880–1918,”

Military historians have often emphasised technological innovation as a, or even the, defining characteristic of modern, “machine age” warfare. Even when the presence of animals in large numbers is acknowledged, as with equines during the world wars, they are often seen as evidence of military anachronism. This dated paradigm ignores the central roles that animals have played in twentieth-century wars and fails to recognise that the scale of their exploitation has actually escalated in modernity, largely in response to technological innovation. In short, the military employment of animals on a massive scale is as much a defining characteristic of modern warfare as is mechanisation. Here, the example of the establishment of permanent, regular, military dog units, for use in “civilised” warfare, from the 1880s onwards is used to illustrate this point

Pigeons in the Trenches: animals, communications technologies and the British Expeditionary Force, 1914-1918

Having rejected their use before the war, the British Expeditionary Force established a Carrier Pigeon Service as a pragmatic response to the difficulties of maintaining frontline communications on the fire-swept battlefields of France and Flanders. The success of the service is a powerful illustration of the significant, if largely unheralded, role played by animals in modern warfare. It serves too, to warn against a tendency to over-emphasise the impact of the technologically-innovative in the writing of military history. Carrier pigeons may have been an ‘old’ technology, but, during the positional warfare of 1915-17, they were acknowledged to be of more practical utility for units in combat than wireless sets

La transformación de la moral militar: armas y soldados en el campo de batalla del siglo XIX

Translated by Esther Montañés SánchezTraducción a cargo de Esther Montañés Sánche

Slavery and the “American Way of War” 1607-1861

Slavery and warfare were inextricably intertwined in the history of Britain’s North American colonies and, subsequently, the early republic. Yet this deep connection has not been acknowledged in the historiography. In particular, the debate about an “American Way of War” has neglected the profound significance of slavery as a formative factor in America’s “First Way of War”. Here, these two forms of organised, systemic violence are considered not merely within a comparative framework but as phenomena whose relationship is so deeply enmeshed that they cannot be meaningfully understood in isolation. Slavery is thus placed centrally in an examination of American war-making, from the colonial to the antebellum period. Three main areas are highlighted: slave raiding against Native Americans; slavery as a factor in imperial and national strategy-making and diplomacy; slavery as an “internal war”

Scapegoat arm: twentieth-century cavalry in Anglophone historiography

The cavalry has not been treated kindly by military historians. Portrayed as an anachronism on the twentieth-century battlefield, the arm became a convenient scapegoat for failures in war and the slow pace of modernisation in peacetime. This article traces the debate over cavalry over the course of the last hundred years, drawing both on contemporary sources and later historical analysis. It is suggested that a reassessment of the capabilities of early twentieth-century soldiers and an interest in the military history of eastern Europe has led, in turn, to a more positive interpretation of the cavalry's role in modern warfare