Red Sabbath: The Battle of Little Bighorn: 0 - Softcover

Each volume in the 'Railways of Britain' series is based on the hugely successful and innovative two-volume atlas of the Railways of Great Britain by Colonel Michael Cobb. The individual regional titles include over 40 maps updated and revised from Cobb's original work. The maps show the railway network in terms of those lines still open, those still open for freight traffic only, those preserved and those closed completely. Alongside the railway lines, the book also includes a current road network in simplified form to allow the inter-relationship between railways and roads to be clearly identified. In addition to the mapping, each volume also includes a detailed history outlining the development of the area's railway network.The third volume in the series covers the counties of Devon and Cornwall. The history of railway development in the region stretches back to the earliest years of the railway age with the Bodmin & Wadebridge opening in 1834 and with numerous mineral lines constructed to convey the region's rich mineral resources from mines to ports. As elsewhere, however, the railway network of today, shorn of many of the duplicate routes and rural branch lines, is but a pale shadow of that which existed at the height of the railway boom, but it still forms an essential link between the region and the rest of the country and between many of the scattered communities that form much of the area.

There are few battles in the sometimes bloody history of the expansion of the United States in North American during the Indian Wars that are more famous than Little Bighorn. The romantic view of Custer's last stand against marauding hordes of Indians has achieved iconic status but the reality was somewhat different, as recent research has shown. "The Battle of Little Bighorn" was the culmination of a process of attrition between the Native Americans and European settlers. On 25 June 1876 this clash of cultures was settled by force of arms as the 7th Cavalry under Custer came upon a huge Indian camp by the Little Bighorn River. The resulting battle was the stuff of legends, but legends based on misconception and hearsay - no members of the 7th Cavalry survived to tell their tale and the Indians recorded their triumph in pictographs and oral memory, long undeciphered by historians.In "Red Sabbath", military historian Robert Kershaw analyses the causes of Custer's defeat from the standpoint of a professional soldier, and examines the multitude of factors that lay behind this setback of a modern US Army's campaign against an unsophisticated foe. Bringing a forensic examination to the subject, this new view of the battle will be required reading for all those with an interst in the military history of the USA and of the career of that most famous of historical figures, General Custer. Drawing evidence from a wide range of sources, including contemporary reports of the battle, personal analysis of the battlefield and the most recent archaeological investigations, Kershaw explores the background to the battle and its results. His analysis debunks many of the myths about Custer's abilities as a military commander and previous generalisations of this savage encounter, providing a unique insight into the Battle of Little Bighorn.