Under The Bloody Flag

Long before Blackbeard, Captain Kidd and Black Barty terrorised the Caribbean, the seas around the British Isles swarmed with pirates. Thousands of men turned to piracy at sea, often as a makeshift strategy of survival. Piracy was a business, not a way of life. Although the young Francis Drake became the most famous pirate of the period, scores of little-known pirate leaders operated during this time, acquiring mixed reputations on land and at sea. Captain Henry Strangeways earned notoriety for his attacks on French shipping in the Channel and the Irish Sea, selling booty ashore in south-west England and Wales. John Callice, and his associates, sailed in consort with others, including another arch-pirate, Robert Hicks, plundering French, Spanish, Danish and Scottish shipping, in voyages that ranged from Scotland to Spain. The first British pirates led erratic careers, but their roving in local waters paved the way for the more aggressive and ambitious deep-sea piracy in the Caribbean.

Mutiny tore like wildfire through the wooden warships of the age of revolution. While commoners across Europe laid siege to the nobility and enslaved workers put the torch to plantation islands, out on the oceans, naval seamen by the tens of thousands turned their guns on the quarterdeck and overthrew the absolute rule of captains. By the early 1800s, anywhere between one-third and one-half of all naval seamen serving in the North Atlantic had participated in at least one mutiny, many of them in several, and some even on ships in different navies. In The Bloody Flag, historian Niklas Frykman explores in vivid prose how a decade of violent conflict onboard gave birth to a distinct form of radical politics that brought together the egalitarian culture of North Atlantic maritime communities with the revolutionary era’s constitutional republicanism. The attempt to build a radical maritime republic failed, but the red flag that flew from the masts of mutinous ships survived to become the most enduring global symbol of class struggle, economic justice, and republican liberty to this day.

The Bloody Flag uses Romania as a model for examining the unifying and destructive capacities of nationalist passions in a period of historical transition.

Agatha Christie meets Patrick O'Brian in the first book in a new series of swashbuckling historical mysteries featuring Spider John Rush, a most reluctant pirate. 1722--aboard a pirate ship off the American Colonial Coast. Spider John Rush never wanted to be a pirate, but it had happened and he'd learned to survive in the world of cut and thrust, fight or die. He and his friend Ezra knew that death could come at any moment, from grapeshot or storm winds or the end of a noose. But when Ezra is murdered in cold blood by a shipmate, Spider vows revenge. On a ship where every man is a killer many times over, how can Spider find the man who killed his friend? There is no law here, so if justice is to be done, he must do it. He will have to solve the crime and exact revenge himself. One wrong step will lead to certain death, but Spider is determined to look into the dying eyes of the man who killed his friend, even if it means his own death.

Long before Blackbeard, Captain Kidd and Black Barty terrorised the Caribbean, the seas around the British Isles swarmed with pirates. Thousands of men turned to piracy at sea, often as a makeshift strategy of survival. Piracy was a business, not a way of life. Although the young Francis Drake became the most famous pirate of the period, scores of little-known pirate leaders operated during this time, acquiring mixed reputations on land and at sea. Captain Henry Strange ways earned notoriety for his attacks on French shipping in the Channel and the Irish Sea, selling booty ashore in south-west England and Wales. John Callice, and his associates, sailed in consort with others, including another arch-pirate, Robert Hicks, plundering French, Spanish, Danish and Scottish shipping, in voyages that ranged from Scotland to Spain. The first British pirates led erratic careers, but their roving in local waters paved the way for the more aggressive and ambitious deep-sea piracy in the Caribbean.

In Kansas and Missouri, the War Between the States started long before Fort Sumter. Daniel Fitzgerald, a Southerner who tries to settle Kansas and leave behind his tormented Louisiana roots, soon finds that in Kansas Territory you have to take sides or die. Taking sides doesn't lessen the chances of a violent death, it just determines who is going to try and kill you. For Massachusetts-born Rebecca Styles, who comes to Kansas to insure freedom for slaves, the choice is easy. Or is it? When she meets Daniel, she is forced to take a new look at all the ideas she took for granted, like all Southerners are evil and all abolitionists are good. Daniel's half-brother and former slave, Andre, knows his first loyalty belongs to his friends and family, not a lofty ideal, but he can't sit by and do nothing when injustice stares him in the face. Throw into the mix all the larger-than-life characters who played a part in the sectional violence which led the nation into its bloodiest war and you have a novel with all the drama of the era. You'll meet James Lane, John Brown, JEB Stuart, Robert E. Lee, Joseph Shelby, Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln, and the other men and women who have shaped this nation into what it is today. You will never look at any of them as just characters in a history book again. This is a historical novel unlike any you have ever read before. It is a blend of history, action and romance. Facts read like fiction, and fiction could have been fact. It is a story of a time that changed a nation and a handful of people who lived and died in our nation's most colorful era."

From the Norman Invasion in 1066 to the eve of the First World War, Stick a Flag in It is a thousand-year jocular journey through the history of Britain and its global empire. The British people have always been eccentric, occasionally ingenious and, sure, sometimes unhinged – from mad monarchs to mass-murdering lepers. Here, Arran Lomas shows us how they harnessed those traits to forge the British nation, and indeed the world, we know today. Follow history’s greatest adventurers from the swashbuckling waters of the Caribbean to the vast white wasteland of the Antarctic wilderness, like the British spy who infiltrated a top-secret Indian brothel and the priest who hid inside a wall but forgot to bring a packed lunch. At the very least you’ll discover Henry VIII’s favourite arse-wipe, whether the flying alchemist ever made it from Scotland to France, and the connection between Victorian coffee houses and dildos. Forget what you were taught in school – this is history like you’ve never heard it before, full of captivating historical quirks that will make you laugh out loud and scratch your head in disbelief.

Henry VIII fought many wars, against the French and Scots, against rebels in England and the Gaelic lords of Ireland, even against his traditional allies in the Low Countries. But how much did these wars really affect his subjects? And what role did Henry's reign play in the long-term transformation of England's military capabilities? The English People at War in the Age of Henry VIII searches for the answers to these questions in parish and borough account books, wills and memoirs, buildings and paintings, letters from Henry's captains, and the notes readers wrote in their printed history books. It looks back from Henry's reign to that of his grandfather, Edward IV, who in 1475 invaded France in the afterglow of the Hundred Years War, and forwards to that of Henry's daughter Elizabeth, who was trying by the 1570s to shape a trained militia and a powerful navy to defend England in a Europe increasingly polarised by religion. War, it shows, marked Henry's England at every turn: in the news and prophecies people discussed, in the money towns and villages spent on armour, guns, fortifications, and warning beacons, in the way noblemen used their power. War disturbed economic life, made men buy weapons and learn how to use them, and shaped people's attitudes to the king and to national history. War mobilised a high proportion of the English population and conditioned their relationships with the French and Scots, the Welsh and the Irish. War should be recognised as one of the defining features of life in the England of Henry VIII.