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This article explores the military use of dogs in the west, principally from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. It is argued that the use of 'war dogs' was a recurrent but essentially ad hoc, sporadic and localized practice, quite distinct from the regular dog handling units that were established in the late nineteenth century. However, from the earliest phases of European colonization in the fifteenth century, another tradition, which employed dogs as weapons and instruments of torture, developed in the context of racialized warfare. The legacy of this infamous practice would be felt again in the twentieth century.

Having rejected their use before the war, the British Expeditionary Force established a Carrier Pigeon Service as a pragmatic response to the difficulties of maintaining frontline communications on the fire-swept battlefields of France and Flanders. The success of the service is a powerful illustration of the significant, if largely unheralded, role played by animals in modern warfare. It serves too, to warn against a tendency to over-emphasise the impact of the technologically-innovative in the writing of military history. Carrier pigeons may have been an 'old' technology, but, during the positional warfare of 1915-17, they were acknowledged to be of more practical utility for units in combat than wireless sets.1

AbstractAlthough Roman persecution of Christians was sporadic and localised for much of the first three centuries of the church's existence, it is argued here that such persecution was nevertheless crucial in the creation and shaping of a distinct Christian identity. The primary deviance of the radical Jewish sect that had surrounded Jesus himself created a "sticky reputation" that endured even when the church had become largely politically and socially conservative. Periodic outbreaks of violence towards those labelled Christians by the authorities created a transactional relationship, in which the victims and their co‐religionists responded by the explicit adoption of a deviant identity and experienced the corollary reconstruction of the self in terms of attitudes, mores and affiliations (secondary deviance). This transaction halted a drift towards religious syncretism that might otherwise have seen Jesus take his place within the henotheistic Roman Pantheon, and thus ensured the survival of the Christian faith as monotheistic and oppositional to Roman religio.

Anthropomorphism has generally been considered a fitter device for poets and writers of sentimental literature than for historians. Yet mankind has largely moved beyond the arrogant dismissal of our fellow creatures as soulless machines, a divine gift for us to exploit without thought for their suffering or pain. Historians might now recognize that their, conventionally, most anthropocentric of disciplines needs to understand those animals that have contributed so much to shaping our past, to think with them and credit them with a perspective. Here, taking up the challenge laid down by the historian of the South African War Sandra Swart, an examination of the methodological issues surrounding the 'writing in' of animals into military history will identify an established tradition of 'subaltern studies' within the historiography of war, which has prepared the ground intellectually for the inclusion of non-human animals. Following this, a consideration of the experiences of horses during the American Civil War, informed by both contemporary records and modern equine science, will then demonstrate both the possibility, and the desirability, of according due attention to 'animal soldiers' in the writing of military history.

By the middle decade of the nineteenth century, soldiers of experience across Europe were confidently asserting that, as a consequence of the new 'arms of precision' being issued to infantrymen, the 'days of cavalry were passed'. This view has been echoed uncritically by subsequent generations of historians. Drawing on a range of original materials, it will be argued here that the disappointing performance of cavalry on the battlefields of the Crimea, Italy, and Bohemia owed more to doctrinal failure than infantry fire-power. While recognizing the changed conditions of the battlefield, the cavalry arm in fact successfully reformed and, despite the onward march of weapon technology, entered the global conflict of 1914 at the very peak of its efficiency and utility.

The cavalry has not been treated kindly by military historians. Portrayed as an anachronism on the twentieth-century battlefield, the arm became a convenient scapegoat for failures in war and the slow pace of modernisation in peacetime. This article traces the debate over cavalry over the course of the last hundred years, drawing both on contemporary sources and later historical analysis. It is suggested that a reassessment of the capabilities of early twentieth-century soldiers and an interest in the military history of eastern Europe has led, in turn, to a more positive interpretation of the cavalry's role in modern warfare.