Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America

by John Keegan

Overview

At once a grand tour of the battlefields of North America and an unabashedly personal tribute to the military prowess of an essentially unwarlike people.  • "[A] magisterial narrative history, enriched by an authorial voice."--The Washington Post

Fields of Battle spans more than two centuries and the expanse of a continent to show how the immense spaces of North America shaped the wars that were fought on its soil.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307828583
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/19/2012
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

John Keegan’s books include The Iraq War, Intelligence in War, The First World War, The Battle for History, The Face of Battle, War and Our World, The Masks of Command, Fields of Battle, and A History of Warfare. He was the defense editor of The Daily Telegraph (London). He lived in Wiltshire, England, until his death in 2012.

Editorial Reviews

From one of the best military historians comes this unorthodox and impressive work about the decisive wars for North America. Don't expect battles and campaigns or heroes and villains to predominate, or even any single narrative form. Instead, Keegan simultaneously engages various forms--biography, the Americana travelogue, the battlefield guidebook, topographical description--in explaining the problems faced by warfarers on this continent. Distance above all influenced their strategies, and water routes the placement of their forts. Keegan analyzes four wars: the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the Sioux War of 1876. Smoothly changing his writing gears--from, for example, the present appearance of the Plains of Abraham to its aspect in the battle there of 1759--Keegan explains the strategies an attacker had to consider when traversing vast spaces. Often the method was amphibious, achieved mostly by fluke by the British at Quebec, but a failure when they tried to repeat it against the Americans in 1781 at Yorktown. By 1862 the result was no different, as the Confederates threw McClellan back from the same area. Observing together the past and present and the timelessness of geography, Keegan renders the fights over America in constantly surprising fashion--fascinating to any history buff.

Gilbert Taylor

Distinguished British military historian Keegan (A History of Warfare, 1993, etc.) poignantly weaves personal reflections and historical analysis together in an insightful, oddly charming account of the relationship between America's landscapes and the wars that have taken place on our continent.

A self-confessed Americanophile (he begins and ends his account with the words "I love America"), Keegan eloquently writes of his deep feelings of affection for the nation and its people, of his first impressions of the transatlantic allies as a youth in WW II England, of his trips through the America of the 1950s and the very different country of the 1970s, and of his thoughts on certain unique qualities of American thought and character. Keegan offers little in the way of a unified historical theme or argument for his disparate observations on America. Instead, his account of American forts and battlefields seems to have more in common with the excellent English tradition of travel writing, a genre spiced with deep historical learning and insight. Keegan selects a broad range of battlefields, from the sites of the French and Indian Wars through the fortresses of the Revolution and the Civil War, to the battlefields of the Indian Wars of the western plains. In each case Keegan shows how geography—command of key rivers and other waterways and access to natural resources—dictated the course of the war. Keegan ends his American odyssey in Kitty Hawk, N.C., and meditates on the Wright brothers' achievement there, which presaged the aeronautical technology that would dominate war and travel in the 20th century.

Fans of Keegan, aficionados of American military history, and Americanophiles of all kinds will delight in this learned, affectionate, and highly personal look at our peace-loving nation and its warlike history.

Kirkus Reviews

"[A] magisterial narrative history, enriched by an authorial voice."—The Washington Post

From the Publisher