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.
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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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Albert-Jean Michel de Rocca and the Most Dangerous Road in Napoleonic Spain

Most memoirs by French officers who took part in the Napoleonic occupation of Spain lauded their victories and achievements on the battlefield with the exception of Albert-Jean Michel de Rocca (1788-1818), a lieutenant who served in the French Army until 1810 when he was injured and forced to hobble back to France on the most dangerous stretch of road in the war.

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King Sverre of Norway: The Birkebeiner Alliance and Rise to Power, 1177-1184    

Around the year 1175, when Sverre Sigurdsson learned he was the son of King Sigurd (II) Munn, he left the Faroes where he was raised and returned to the land of his birth.

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Sverre Sigurdsson (1151-1202): The Brothers’ Civil War and Faroese Boy Destined to be Norway’s King

Sometime after his victory at the Battle of Kalvskinnet in 1179, near Trondheim, Norway, King Sverre Sigurdsson (1151-1202), in the second year of his tenuous reign, beckoned an Icelandic abbot named Karl Jonssen, of the Tingeyre (Þingeyri) monastery, in the windswept coast of northwest Iceland, to chronicle his life and ensure his story would prevail through the ages.

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The Ottoman Empire, Hungary, and the Protestant Reformation (II)

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 Ottoman domination of southeastern Europe proceeded rapidly – causing a political and religious crisis within the Holy Roman Empire.

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