The Crimean War was the most destructive conflict of Queen Victoria's reign, the outcome of which was indecisive; most historians regard it as an irrelevant and unnecessary conflict despite its fame for Florence Nightingale and the Charge of the Light Brigade. Here Hugh Small shows how the history of the Crimean War has been manipulated to conceal Britain's – and Europe's – failure. The war governments and early historians combined to withhold the truth from an already disappointed nation in a deception that lasted over a century. Accounts of battles, still widely believed, gave fictitious leadership roles to senior officers. Careful analysis of the fighting shows that most of Britain's military successes in the war were achieved by the common soldiers, who understood tactics far better than the officer class and who acted usually without orders and often in contravention of them. Hugh Small's mixture of politics and battlefield narrative identifies a turning point in history, and raises disturbing questions about the utility of war.
Praise for Small's earlier work on Nightingale: 'Hugh Small, in a masterly piece of historical detective work, convincingly demonstrates what all previous historians and biographers have missed . . . This is a compelling psychological portrait of a very eminent (and complex) Victorian.' James Le Fanu, Daily Telegraph Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) is best known as a reformer of hospital nursing during and after the Crimean War, but many feel that her nursing reputation has been overstated. A Brief History of Florence Nightingale tells the story of the sanitary disaster in her wartime hospital and why the government covered it up against her wishes. After the war she worked to put the lessons of the tragedy to good use to reduce the very high mortality from epidemic disease in the civilian population at home. She did this by persuading Parliament in 1872 to pass laws which required landlords to improve sanitation in working-class homes, and to give local authorities rather than central government the power to enforce the laws. Life expectancy increased dramatically as a result, and it was this peacetime civilian public health reform rather than her wartime hospital nursing record that established Nightingale's reputation in her lifetime. After her death the wartime image became popular again as a means of recruiting hospital nurses and her other achievements were almost forgotten. Today, with nursing's new emphasis on 'primary' care and prevention outside hospitals, Nightingale's focus on public health achievements makes her an increasingly relevant figure.
By carefully reconstructing the chronology of events that led to her breakdown, Hugh Small has produced a new and startling explanation of Florence Nightingale's actions. After describing her unusual upbringing the author compares the conflicting contemporary accounts of what really happened in Nightingale's hospital at Scutari, near Constantinople, during the war. By tracing the gradual emergence of information in the war's aftermath, Small shows that there was an official cover-up of a public health disaster. Drawing on recent research by army historians, he shows how the cover-up involved Florence Nightingale in Queen Victoria's conflict with the Government over royal control of the Army."--BOOK JACKET.
The first edition of this biography of Florence Nightingale (published by Constable in 1998) was hailed as a 'masterly piece of historical detective work' by medical historian James le Fanu in the Daily Telegraph and as a 'shattering blow' by Nightingale's biographer Mark Bostridge. This second edition, published in May 2013, adds more detail of Nightingale's journey from tragedy to triumph, and shows how she contributed directly to the astonishing increase in life expectancy in Victorian Britain. Today, with nursing's new emphasis on primary care and prevention outside hospitals, her pioneering public health work makes her an increasingly relevant figure.
Describes human evolution from a new perspective - showing that the human brain did not evolve as a standalone computer but as a component of a human internet. That is why our Stone Age ancestors had a real democratic society. We are now about to return to proper democracy after thousands of years of hierarchical control.
The third and main section of the document discusses ways of increasing the contribution of small-scale fisheries to poverty alleviation and food security through nine main entry points. First, the paper revisits conventional fisheries policies and legislation and makes suggestions on how those can be made more pro-poor. Next, the paper emphasizes the importance of capacity building and highlights how cross-sectoral interventions can greatly improve the livelihoods of fish-dependent communities. The paper then proposes a series of broad pro-poor or pro-small-scale fisheries principles, before discussing in greater detail three of the main management instruments adopted in fisheries: (i) property right approaches; (ii) co-management; and (iii) protected areas. The next two sub-sections discuss markets and how to make them work for the poor, and the important issue of pro-poor financing systems and subsidies.
Presents a revisionist narrative account of the Crimean War (1854-56). This book claims that after the Crimean War the British Government kept secret the real objectives of the War and the reasons for its failure.
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