Red Sabbath: The Battle of Little Bighorn - encuadernado, tapa blanda

There are few battles in the sometimes bloody history of the expansion of the United States in North America during the Indian Wars that are more famous than Little Bighorn. The romantic view of Custer's last stand against marauding hordes of Indians has achieved iconic status but the reality was somewhat different, as recent research has shown. The Battle of Little Bighorn was the culmination of a process of attrition between the Native Americans and European settlers. The latter saw in the land controlled by the Indians opportunities for expansion and great wealth, often as the result of the discovery of gold; the former saw the arrival of the white man as a major threat to their way of life and to their future. On 25 June 1876 this clash of cultures was settled by force of arms as the 7th Cavalry under George Armstrong Custer came upon a huge Indian camp by the Little Bighorn River. The resulting battle was the stuff of legend, but legends based upon misconceptions and romantic hearsay - no members of the 7th Cavalry survived to tell their tale and the Indians recorded their triumph in pictographs and oral memory, long undeciphered by historians. In Red Sabbath: The Battle of Little Bighorn noted military historian Robert Kershaw turns his attention to this classic encounter between the United States Army and the Plains Indians. Analyzing the causes of Custer's defeat from the standpoint of a professional soldier, he examines the multitude of factors that lay behind this setback of a modern US Army's campaign against an unsophisticated foe. Bringing a forensic examination to the subject, this new view of the battle will be required reading for all those with an interest in themilitary history of the USA and of the career of that iconic figure, Custer. Drawing evidence from a wide range of sources, including contemporary reports of the battle, personal analysis of the battlefield and the most recent archaeological investigations, Kershaw explores the b