John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, has long been regarded as one of Britain's greatest generals as well as a key English political figure in the first decade of the eighteenth century. The subject of numerous books in English, Marlborough has typically been seen only in terms of British political and military history. In this book, twelve leading specialists of the period broaden the perspective by assessing Marlborough in the wider and more diverse contexts of the European situation, the common soldier in the British army, the complementary activities of navies, the differing perspectives of the Austrians, Dutch, French, and Germans as well as in the context of the British popular press and the visual arts. AUTHOR: John Brewster Hattendorf is an American naval historian. He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of more than forty books on British and American maritime history and naval warfare. In 2005, the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings described him as "one of the most widely known and well respected naval historians in the world." In reference to his work on the history of naval strategy, an academic in Britain termed him the "doyen of US naval educators." Since 1984, he has been the Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the United States Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He has called maritime history "a subject that touches on both the greatest moments of the human spirit as well as on the worst, including war." In 2011, the Naval War College announced the establishment of the Hattendorf Prize for Distinguished Original Research in Maritime History, named for him. The 2014 Oxford Naval Conference - 'Strategy and the Sea' - celebrated his distinguished career on 10?12 April 2014.
