Author: Benjamin J. Swenson

News Stories

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.

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Captain John Grant Tod, Texas Sailor in the Heart of Sin City Mexico, 1848

Born in 1808 near Lexington, Kentucky, John Grant Tod, the youngest of nine children born to pious immigrants from Scotland, left home at seventeen.

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