Churchill Scholar James Muller in Conversation with Gregg Collins About The River War

March 23 2024 | 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

301 E Scenic Dr, Pass Christian, MS 39571

Join Churchill scholars James Muller and J. Gregg Collins in conversation about Winston Churchill and The River War. Muller's recent republication of Churchill's two volume The River War will be on sale and available for editor James Muller's signature.   

James Muller published the definitive edition of “The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan” by Winston Churchill after more than 30 years of meticulous work. This is the first time in over a century that the story has been told and published in its entirety. Muller’s book, published by St. Augustine’s Press in two volumes, is the first unabridged edition to appear since Churchill himself published the first edition in 1899. 

James W. Muller is Professor of Political Science at the University of Alaska Anchorage, where he has taught since 1983, and Chairman of the Board of Academic Advisers of the International Churchill Society. Educated at Harvard University and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, he is a by-fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and served as a White House Fellow in 1983–84 and an Academic Visitor at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1988–89.

J. Gregg Collins is a resident of Pass Christian and the President (Prime Minister) of The Churchill Society of New Orleans. His law practice focuses on mediation and arbitration. The mission of The Churchill Society of New Orleans is to spread appreciation of the thoughts, words and deeds of Winston Spencer Churchill, to foster an outlook on world events that builds on his leadership, his wisdom, his courage, his love of Anglo-American traditions, his renowned prescience and to enjoy the brilliance of his writings, speeches and wit. 

“This book sets a new standard for Churchill scholarship and in doing so tells us much about how Churchill used his words and actions to launch his career,” said Allen Packwood OBE, director of the Churchill Archives Centre.

Winston Churchill wrote five books before he was elected to Parliament at the age of twenty-five. The most impressive of these books, The River War tells the story of Britain’s arduous and risky campaign to reconquer the Sudan at the end of the nineteenth century. More than half a century of subjection to Egypt had ended a decade earlier when Sudanese Dervishes rebelled against foreign rule and killed Britain’s envoy Charles Gordon at his palace in Khartoum in 1885. Political Islam collided with European imperialism. Herbert Kitchener’s Anglo-Egyptian army, advancing hundreds of miles south along the Nile through the Sahara Desert, defeated the Dervish army at the battle of Omdurman on September 2, 1898.

 Half a century after The River War appeared, this book was one of a handful of his works singled out by the Swedish Academy when it awarded Churchill the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. Now, once again, its reader can follow Churchill back to the war he fought on the Nile, beginning with the words of his youngest daughter. Before she died, Mary Soames wrote a new foreword, published here, which concludes that “In this splendid new edition…we have, in effect, the whole history of The River War as Winston Churchill wrote it—and it makes memorable reading.”