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Mercenaries In Popular Culture
Like piracy, the mercenary ethos resonates with idealized adventure, mystery, and danger, and appears frequently in popular culture. Many are called adventurers, filibuster (military), filibusters, soldiers of fortune, gunslingers, gunrunners, ronin, and knights errant. Books * In "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", from Washington Irving's ''Knickerbocker Tales'', the infamous Headless Horseman was said to be the ghost of a Hessian (soldiers), Hessian mercenary who had been Decapitation, decapitated by a cannonball during the American Revolution. * Walter Scott's "A Legend of Montrose", set in Scotland during the Scotland in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, Civil War of the 1640s includes the finely drawn character Dugald Dalgetty, an experienced mercenary who does not fight out of political or religious conviction, but purely for the love of carnage. However, he is very professional, and remains loyal to an employer to the end of his contract. He gained his experience fighting for vari ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Piracy
Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship or a coastal area, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and other valuable goods. Those who conduct acts of piracy are called pirates, vessels used for piracy are pirate ships. The earliest documented instances of piracy were in the 14th century BC, when the Sea Peoples, a group of ocean raiders, attacked the ships of the Aegean and Mediterranean civilisations. Narrow channels which funnel shipping into predictable routes have long created opportunities for piracy, as well as for privateering and commerce raiding. Historic examples include the waters of Gibraltar, the Strait of Malacca, Madagascar, the Gulf of Aden, and the English Channel, whose geographic structures facilitated pirate attacks. The term ''piracy'' generally refers to maritime piracy, although the term has been generalized to refer to acts committed on land, in the air, on computer networks, and (in scie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scotland In The Wars Of The Three Kingdoms
Between 1639 and 1653, Scotland was involved in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, a series of wars starting with the Bishops Wars (between Scotland and England), the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the English Civil War (and its extension in Scotland), the Irish Confederate Wars, and finally the subjugation of Ireland and Scotland by the English Roundhead New Model Army. In Scotland itself, from 1644 to 1645 a Scottish civil war was fought between Scottish Royalists—supporters of Charles I under James Graham, 1st Marquis of Montrose—and the Covenanters, who had controlled Scotland since 1639 and allied with the English Parliament. The Scottish Royalists, aided by Irish troops, had a rapid series of victories in 1644–45, but were eventually defeated by the Covenanters. The Covenanters then found themselves at odds with the English Parliament, so they crowned Charles II at Scone and thus stated their intention to place him on the thrones of England and Ireland as well. This l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frederick Russell Burnham
Frederick Russell Burnham DSO (May 11, 1861 – September 1, 1947) was an American scout and world-traveling adventurer. He is known for his service to the British South Africa Company and to the British Army in colonial Africa, and for teaching woodcraft to Robert Baden-Powell in Rhodesia. He helped inspire the founding of the international Scouting Movement. Burnham was born on a Dakota Sioux Indian reservation in Minnesota, in the small village of Tivoli near the city of Mankato, there he learned the ways of American Indians as a boy. By the age of 14, he was supporting himself in California, while also learning scouting from some of the last of the cowboys and frontiersmen of the American Southwest. Burnham had little formal education, never finishing high school. After moving to the Arizona Territory in the early 1880s, he was drawn into the Pleasant Valley War, a feud between families of ranchers and sheepherders. He escaped and later worked as a civilian tracker for t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Walker (filibuster)
William Walker (May 8, 1824September 12, 1860) was an American physician, lawyer, journalist, and mercenary. In the era of the expansion of the United States, driven by the doctrine of "manifest destiny", Walker organized unauthorized military expeditions into Mexico and Central America with the intention of establishing SLAVE-HOLD colonies. Such an enterprise was known at the time as "filibustering". After settling in California and motivated by an earlier filibustering project of Gaston de Raousset-Boulbon, Walker attempted in 1853–54 to take Baja California and Sonora. He declared those territories to be an independent Republic of Sonora, but he was soon driven back to California by the Mexican forces. Walker then went to Nicaragua in 1855 as leader of a mercenary army employed by the Democratic Party in its civil war against the Legitimists. He took control of the Nicaraguan government and in July 1856 set himself up as the country's president. Walker's regime was re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philo Norton McGiffin
Philo Norton McGiffin (December 12/13, 1860 – February 11, 1897) was an American soldier of fortune serving in Chinese service as a naval advisor during the First Sino-Japanese War. Although primarily skilled as an instructor and administrator, he proved a talented tactician during the September 17, 1894 Battle of the Yalu River as well as the first American to command a modern battleship in wartime. Early life Born to Civil War officer Colonel Norton McGiffin and Sarah Quail in Washington, Pennsylvania, McGiffin attended local Washington and Jefferson College before transferring to the U.S. Naval Academy in 1877. When he was about 12, his older brother Thomas, got into some trouble when he shot the high school principal. While Philo was at Annapolis, he gained a reputation as a practical joker. In 1884, McGiffin qualified as a passed midshipman but was among several classmates who were discharged with one year's pay when there were no available positions in the body of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 187424 January 1965) was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945 Winston Churchill in the Second World War, during the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955. Apart from two years between 1922 and 1924, he was a Member of Parliament (United Kingdom), Member of Parliament (MP) from 1900 to 1964 and represented a total of five UK Parliament constituency, constituencies. Ideologically an Economic liberalism, economic liberal and British Empire, imperialist, he was for most of his career a member of the Conservative Party (UK), Conservative Party, which he led from 1940 to 1955. He was a member of the Liberal Party (UK), Liberal Party from 1904 to 1924. Of mixed English and American parentage, Churchill was born in Oxfordshire to Spencer family, a wealthy, aristocratic family. He joined the British Army in 1895 and saw action in British Raj, Br ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Harden-Hickey
James Harden-Hickey (born James Aloysius Harden, December 8, 1854 – February 9, 1898) was a Franco-American author, newspaper editor, duellist, adventurer and self-proclaimed Prince of Trinidad, reigning as James I. Early life James Aloysius Harden was born in San Francisco on December 8, 1854. To avoid the violent city still in the madness of the gold rush, James' French mother took him to live in Paris, which was then an Empire under the rule of Napoleon III. The nephew of Napoleon I left his mark on James by making France a wild, flamboyant stage for ornate theatrical displays and public works, and mystifying ceremonies. As a child, James was fascinated with the French court and all of its glamor and pomp. Also, because of the lively brilliance of the live theater, he acquired a lifelong liking of adventure. During boyhood he was taught in Belgium by the Jesuits and later studied law at the University of Leipzig. He entered the French military academy, Saint-Cyr, at 19. In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry McIver
Henry Douglas McIver (1841–1907) was an American mercenary who fought for 18 countries during the nineteenth-century. Early life McIver was born in 1841. He spent first ten years of his life in Virginia, United States, and then he was sent to his uncle, General Donald Graham, to finish school and prepare for West Point. Instead of West Point, McIver joined the private army of the East India Company when he was only 16 years old. Career He was sent to India in 1858. At that time, the Sepoy Mutiny (Sepoy - native soldiers in the East Indian Company army) raged in India. In his first battle, McIver was seriously wounded. In 1860, McIver fought under Giuseppe Garibaldi in Italy, and after that joined the pretender for the Spanish crown, Don Carlos. When the American Civil War broke out, Henry McIver joined the Confederate side. Although he was only 20 years old at the time he was already an experienced soldier. While fighting for the Confederates, he was under the command of t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Harding Davis
Richard Harding Davis (April 18, 1864 – April 11, 1916) was an American journalist and writer of fiction and drama, known foremost as the first American war correspondent to cover the Spanish–American War, the Second Boer War, and the First World War. His writing greatly assisted the political career of Theodore Roosevelt. He also played a major role in the evolution of the American magazine. His influence extended to the world of fashion, and he is credited with making the clean-shaven look popular among men at the turn of the 20th century. Biography Davis was born on April 18, 1864 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.''Encyclopedia of World Biography'', 2nd ed. (1998) His mother Rebecca Harding Davis was a prominent writer in her day. His father, Lemuel Clarke Davis, was himself a journalist and edited the ''Philadelphia Public Ledger''. As a young man, Davis attended the Episcopal Academy. In 1882, after an unhappy year at Swarthmore College, Davis transferred to Lehigh Universi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dime Novel
The dime novel is a form of late 19th-century and early 20th-century U.S. popular fiction issued in series of inexpensive paperbound editions. The term ''dime novel'' has been used as a catchall term for several different but related forms, referring to story papers, five- and ten-cent weeklies, "thick book" reprints, and sometimes early pulp magazines.The English equivalents were generally called penny dreadfuls or shilling shockers. The German and French equivalents were called "Groschenromane" and "livraisons à dix centimes", respectively. American firms also issued foreign editions of many of their works, especially as series characters came into vogue. The term was used as a title as late as 1940, in the short-lived pulp magazine ''Western Dime Novels''. In the modern age, the term ''dime novel'' has been used to refer to quickly written, lurid potboilers, usually as a pejorative to describe a sensationalized but superficial literary work. History In 1860, the publish ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Colonel Thomas Hoyer Monstery
Thomas Hoyer Monstery (born: Thomas Hoyer Mönster) (April 21, 1824 – December 31, 1901) was a Danish-American fencing and boxing instructor, duelist and soldier-of-fortune who fought in a number of Central and South American conflicts during the mid-19th century. Early life Monstery was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. His father, Ole Michael Munster, had been an officer of the Danish Army but had been dismissed from service for having fought a duel; he was later pardoned, but banished from Denmark to serve as the Commandant of the Danish settlement of St. Croix, where he died twelve years later as the result of a lung injury sustained during the duel. Thomas' mother, Bergitha Christina Munster, was the daughter of Meta Anckarström, cousin to Jacob Johan Anckarström who had, in the year 1792, assassinated King Gustav III of Sweden. At the age of twelve, in 1836, Thomas was enlisted as a cadet in the Danish navy, serving on the gunship Bellona and traveling to many foreign port ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south. The country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain, which lies in the North Atlantic, and includes over 100 smaller islands, such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight. The area now called England was first inhabited by modern humans during the Upper Paleolithic period, but takes its name from the Angles, a Germanic tribe deriving its name from the Anglia peninsula, who settled during the 5th and 6th centuries. England became a unified state in the 10th century and has had a significant cultural and legal impact on the wider world since the Age of Discovery, which began during the 15th century. The English language, the Anglican Church, and Engli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
