These are banner times for Triple Alliance War scholarship. Over the last year, two important narrative histories of the conflict have appeared, along with several useful articles on war demographics and three separate biographies (one a novel) of Madame Lynch, the Irish courtesan of Paraguay’s Francisco Solano López—and these studies represent only the English-language publications. When we factor in works written in Spanish, German, and Portuguese, we see extensive progress on all sides, and there seems to be little reason to predict an early end to this interesting trend.
The present study demonstrates exactly why the Triple Alliance War will remain a key topic for future historians—because it was so profoundly catalytic in so many directions at once. Izecksohn builds a nuanced historical sociology of Brazil’s military during the 1860s, showing how poorly prepared Dom Pedro’s army was to fight a war of attrition against Solano López’s Paraguay. In order...
