The History of Waterloo

The Campaign of Waterloo is a military history telling the story of the Battle of Waterloo. The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday, 18 June 1815, near Waterloo in Belgium, part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands at the time. A French army under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated by two of the armies of the Seventh Coalition, a British-led coalition consisting of units from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Hanover, Brunswick, and Nassau, under the command of the Duke of Wellington, referred to by many authors as the Anglo-allied army or Wellington's army, and a Prussian army under the command of Field Marshal von Blücher, referred to also as Blücher's army. The battle marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The battle was contemporaneously known as the Battle of Mont Saint-Jean or La Belle Alliance (the beautiful alliance).

John Codman Ropes (1836-1899) was an American military historian and lawyer. Ropes is known chiefly as the author of The Campaign of Waterloo, which is one of the standard works on the subject.