The eye of command / Kimberly Kagan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kagan, Kimberly, 1972-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

History, Military.

Historiography.

Rome--History, Military--Historiography.

Rome.

Military art and science--Rome--History.

Military art and science.

Ammianus Marcellinus. Rerum gestarum libri.

Ammianus Marcellinus.

Caesar, Julius. De bello Gallico.

Caesar, Julius.

Rome (Empire).

Physical Description:

viii, 271 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2006]

Summary:

Published in 1976, Sir John Keegan's The Face of Battle was a groundbreaking work in military history studies, providing narrative techniques that served as a model for countless subsequent scholarly and popular military histories. Keegan's approach to understanding battles stressed the importance of small unit actions and personal heroism, an approach widely employed in the narratives produced by reporters embedded with American combat troops in Iraq.

Challenging Keegan's seminal work, The Eye of Command offers a new approach to studying and narrating battles, based upon an analysis of the works of the Roman military authors Julius Caesar and Ammianus Marcellinus. Kimberly Kagan argues that historians cannot explain a battle's outcome solely on the basis of soldiers' accounts of small-unit actions. A commander's view, exemplified in Caesar's narratives, helps explain the significance of a battle's major events, how they relate to one another and how they lead to a battle's outcome. The "eye of command" approach also answers fundamental questions about the way commanders perceive battles as they fight them-questions modern military historians have largely ignored.

Contents:

Part 1 The Face of Battle

1 The Face of Battle 7

2 Eyewitness to Battle: Ammianus on Amida 23

3 Strasbourg as a Face of Battle Narrative 52

Part 2 The Eye of Command

4 The Eye of Command 99

5 Caesar's Eye 116

6 Friction: Caesar and the Battle of Gergovia 155.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 243-252) and index.

ISBN:

0472115219

0472031287

OCLC:

61151494

Publisher Number:

9780472115211

9780472031283