Isaac Land

Isaac Land teaches history at Indiana State University. He is writing a book to be entitled Astonish’d Ocean: Sailors and Modernity.

Writing for the centenary celebrations of the Trafalgar victory one hundred years ago, Joseph Conrad produced a remarkable, and peculiar, essay arguing that Nelson was a great, and a modern, artist. His genius was to revolutionise ‘not the strategy or tactics of sea-warfare, but the very conception of victory itself’. In pursuing a total annihilation of the enemy, Nelson led the...

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