Flag and Fleet: How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas

Wood, William, 1864-1947Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
463K words
Chapters
47

Tags

English Originals World HistoryMilitary Historical ReappraisalMilitary StrategyNaval HistorySea VoyageRoyal NavyAdventure JourneyMilitary CommandersHeroismPatriotismDocumentary Narrative

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Flag and Fleet: How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas by William WoodAuthor: Wood, William, 1864-1947,Language: English, Class: DA: History: General and Eastern Hemisphere: Great Britain, Ireland, Central Europe, Release Date: Nov 17, 2006

Editor's review

This is a work on the British Navy by the Canadian historical author William Wood, its subtitle stating its central concern: how the British Navy won and maintained freedom of the seas. Classified under DA for British history, the book adopts a clearly narrative style of historical writing and will appeal to readers interested in naval history, imperial history, and ideas of maritime strategy. Its value lies in showing how the early twentieth-century English-speaking world presented naval tradition and maritime supremacy to general readers, making it a useful sample for understanding popular historical writing and imperial narrative of the period. Two cautions are in order: first, the book's positions and wording carry the coloration of its era, and its treatment of "freedom" and "supremacy" calls for a critical reading; second, it is not a modern scholarly monograph, and specific historical facts should be checked against more recent research before citation. As a public-domain e-book it is easy to search and excerpt, making it suitable as supplementary material for topical reading rather than a sole authority.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Begin with the table of contents and subtitle to grasp the author's organizing logic, then closely read the chapters that interest you.
  2. Distinguish factual statements from the author's evaluations as you read, noting tendentious wording along the way.
  3. Read alongside a modern history of the British Navy to calibrate specific facts and interpretive frameworks.
  4. For topical research, first use the electronic text to search keywords, then return to the original context to verify.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47

FAQ

Is this book a scholarly work of naval history? It is not a scholarly monograph in the modern sense. It is narrative history written for general readers, bearing the early twentieth-century perspective and imperial narrative coloring of its time. It can be used to understand how people of the period told the story of naval tradition, but specific facts and causal judgments should be checked against more recent scholarship.
How should "freedom" in the title be understood? "Freedom" here chiefly means freedom of passage and trade security from the British perspective, and is not equivalent to the concept of freedom in contemporary international law or ocean governance. Readers should understand it within the historical context of imperial rivalry and naval supremacy, and note the influence of the author's position on the narrative.
How difficult is the English, and is it suitable for non-native readers? The original is in English and belongs to public-domain popular historical writing, with rather traditional sentence patterns and possible archaic expressions and proper nouns. Readers with intermediate or better English reading ability and some interest in naval history will find it accessible; beginners are advised to learn the basic background first or read it alongside Chinese-language materials.

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About the author

Wood, William, 1864-1947 Author

William Wood (1864–1947) was an author known for popular chronicles of military and imperial history; details of his life are limited in publicly available sources. Thirteen of his works are held in this collection, most of them chronicles in series format, centered on the Anglo-French struggle for colonial North America, the War of 1812, the American Civil War, and British naval and maritime activity. Representative works include Elizabethan Sea-Dogs, on Drake and his companions; The Winning of Canada, on Wolfe; Captains of the Civil War, on the Blue and Gray commanders; and chronicles dealing with Carleton, Montcalm, the fortress of Louisbourg, and the founding of Canada. His method combines events with portraits of figures, in plain and compact prose that helps general readers follow the course of campaigns and imperial expansion, giving the books a measure of popular value.