Benjamin J. Swenson, Author at THE HISTORY AVENUE

Author: Benjamin J. Swenson

Based in South Korea since 2008, Benjamin J. Swenson is a professor at Hoseo University in Asan. He holds a PhD from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, where his dissertation addressed nineteenth-century Euro-American military history. His hobbies include Viking sagas and chess.

Andrew Jackson’s Brush with Death: The First U.S. Presidential Assassination Attempt and Press War, 1835

On January 30, 1835, as President Andrew Jackson was leaving the U.S. Capitol building through the East Portico following his attendance to a funeral for a congressman, a man appeared, raised a pistol at him, and pulled the trigger.

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Hermann the German’s Transatlantic Legacy: A Teutonic Legend’s Journey from the Hills of Weihen to the Plains of Minnesota

His Latin name was Arminius but on the southern plains of Minnesota, in the small town of New Ulm, he is known as ‘Hermann the German.’

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“Every contractor is a thief.”: Logistics, Insurgents, and the Art of War in Early Napoleonic Spain, 1808–9

Unexpected setbacks to Napoleon’s plan to control Spain at the onset of the Peninsular War (1808–1814) required the emperor to launch a 270,000-man counteroffensive into the heart of the country in late 1808 – culminating with the British defeat at the Battle of Corunna, January 16, 1809.

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The Peninsular War (1808-1814) vs. Spanish War of Independence: A Historiographical Battleground

The main dispute within the historiography of the Peninsular War has always been (and remains) a competing narrative between British and Spanish historians.

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Benjamin Franklin, “The Morals of Chess,” and History’s “Most Universal Game”

One of the most popular and novel games among educated citizens in colonial America was chess, and one of its most prominent advocates was the polymath and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin.