The diary this article is centered on is not remarkable for its content (many others offer considerably more details of battles and everyday life) but for the period it covers. Additional Articles on the New Jersey Brigade and the Campaigns in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, 1777-1778 _ Continental Army officer's diaries abound, but quality and content vary. First-Person Accounts of Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth C. “About an hour before day we dashed through the river again …” The October 1777 Schuylkill Expedition B. New Jersey Brigade Strength returns, November and December 1777, and June 1778 5. William Alexander, Lord Stirling's Division, 1777. Bob, you are an amateur historian in the best sense, for the love of the subject, a wonderful mentor, and a valued comrade. Bob’s initial kindness resulted in a number of collaborations since then, and a cherished, long, but too often long-distance, friendship. From that initial contact, we worked on deciphering seemingly indecipherable words and phrases, clarifying various mentioned names, places, and other references, and attempting to identify the diary author. I have to voice my gratitude to Bob McDonald who shared the manuscript of this diary as well as his transcription-in-progress, way back in the dark ages. This includes several significant innovations in the collection and provision of wartime humanitarian assistance. Given its unique historical status in the English-speaking world, the Crimean War exercised a particularly decisive influence on the conception and conduct of war within the British Empire, as well as in the United States. Given this historical juxtaposition, the Crimean War may be seen as a bridge, or intermediate stage, between the romantic ideal of the heroic still prevalent in the Napoleonic era, and the increasing disillusionment with war triggered by the realities of armed conflict in an age of rapid technological advance, culminating in the collective trauma of the First World War. It has the singular distinction of being the only major war fought by Great Britain in Europe between the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) and the beginning of the Great War (1914). ![]() On many levels, the Crimean War of 1854-6 marks a significant historical watershed between the Romantic and the Modern. ![]() Though the poems are remarkably different moments, their authors' use of history and the mini-epic show a distinctly Victorian preoccupation with the history and culture of war and the forms used to express such preoccupation. Felicia Hemans's "The Wife of Asdrubal," Emily Pfeiffer's "The Fight at Rorke's Drift," and Alfred Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" are three such mini-epics Hemans shows a glimpse of the aftermath of the fall of Carthage to the Roman Empire while Pfeiffer and Tennyson provide insights into two hard-fought British battles against the Zulu and in the Crimea, respectively. These mini-epics represent an attempted return to Homeric poetry that tells a story about a momentous event in time, very often a war or postwar scene from the distant past or the more recent past. ![]() The importance of such spots of time allow readers to, in a sense, insert themselves into a moment in time that has been preserved in poems that mythologize spots of time, that create epics from the authors' own time. ![]() Bishop terms these "spots of time" as "single events" in personal or national history, but this paper argues that Wordsworth's contemporaries and the poets that came after him refer to singular events in history. By creating historical vignettes, Victorians enter moments in history to create their own versions of epic-style poetry. However, this did not prevent these poets from looking critically at history and weaving the past into poems in fact, many Victorian poets used historical events as the framework for their poems. Victorian poets were well aware of the modern condition, the impossibility of returning to the traditions of the past.
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