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World History
Reimers' thoughtful history recognizes the ambiguity and subjectivity of race, noting that individuals often define themselves more complexly than census forms allow. However classified, record numbers of immigrants are streaming to the United States and creating the most diverse society in the world.	Other Immigrants: The Global Origins of the American People David Reimers Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians represent three of every four immigrants who arrived in the United States after 1970. Yet despite their large numbers and long history of movement to America, non-Europeans are conspicuously absent from many books about immigration. In Other Immigrants, David M. Reimers offers the first comprehensive account of non-European immigration, chronicling the compelling and diverse stories of frequently overlooked Americans. Reimers traces the early history of Black, Hispanic, and Asian immigrants from the fifteenth century through World War II, when racial hostility led to the virtual exclusion of Asians and aggression towards Blacks and Hispanics. He then tells the story of post-1945 immigration, when these groups dominated the immigration statistics and began to reshape American society.
	The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805 Richard Zacks In this national bestseller, acclaimed historian Zacks brings the true story of the unheralded American -- William Eaton -- who brought the Barbary pirates to their knees. The carpenters who built the USS Philadelphia, in addition to their craft skills, demonstrated an extraordinary capacity, for alcohol. The project overseer, a Thomas FitzSimons, noted in his expense accounts that he had purchased 110 gallons of rum a month for thirty carpenters. Sober math reveals that each man working six days a week consumed about a pint of ruin a day. (8-page photo section.) Image Burning of the USS Philadelphia in the harbor of Tripoli, 1897. Edward Moran, Artist.
	Click for a Selection of Books on Lighthouses Around the World for Kids and Adults: West Coast and East Coast United States, Ireland, South Africa, the Carolinas, mid-Atlantic floating lighthouses, Inland lakes . . . Unlike many other countries, France has resisted the trend toward total automation, and in many small ports and seaside towns, the lighthouse keeper is still a well known and respected figure. World renowned lighthouse photographer Jean Guichard's famously dramatic photographs of storms at sea illustrate the perilous working conditions the lighthouse keepers face, and the text by Rene Gast provides a fascinating glimpse into the daily lives of these men and women, whose determination and nerves of steel have saved countless lives over the centuries. Even the workmen who built these technological marvels risked their lives with every wave, and had to be strapped bellydown on the rock to avoid being washed away. Today, the job still requires a great deal of nerve where keepers are still winched down to the deck of the relief boat by hand, dangling from ropes over crashing seas. The book also contains reproductions of a number of historical documents about lighthouses.
Please click here to review an extensive selection of books on Sea History, including: A History of Sea Power Admiralty and Maritime Laws in the Mediterranean Sea Tongataboo Ancient Greeks Beyond the Windswept Dunes Black Sea Britain and the Sea Colliers Across the Sea and many more, such as those below . . .
Author Roger Crowley is a UK-based writer and historian and a graduate of Cambridge University. As the child of a naval family, his fascination with the Mediterranean world started early, on the island of Malta. He has lived in Istanbul, walked across much of western Turkey, and traveled widely throughout the region. His particular interests are the Byzantine, Venetian, and Ottoman empires, seafaring, and eyewitness history. He is the author of three books on the empires of the Mediterranean and its surroundings: 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West (2005), Empires of the Sea (2008) and City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas (2012).	Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World Roger Crowley In 1521, Suleiman the Magnificent, Muslim ruler of the Ottoman Empire, dispatched an invasion fleet to the Christian island of Rhodes. This would prove to be the opening shot in an epic clash between rival empires and faiths for control of the Mediterranean and the center of the world. In Empires of the Sea, acclaimed historian Roger Crowley has written a thrilling account of this brutal decades-long battle between Christendom and Islam for the soul of Europe, a fast-paced tale of spiraling intensity that ranges from Istanbul to the Gates of Gibraltar. Crowley conjures up a wild cast of pirates, crusaders, and religious warriors struggling for supremacy and survival in a tale of slavery and galley warfare, desperate bravery and utter brutality. Empires of the Sea is a story of extraordinary color and incident, and provides a crucial context for our own clash of civilizations.
Men O' War, The Illustrated Story of Life in Nelson's Navy The film Master and Commander (Fox, summer 2003) brought to life the realities of life in the Navy at the time of the Napoleonic wars. Based on the first of the best-selling Aubrey/Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian, and starring Oscar winner Russell Crowe, Men o'War provides the background to the story, with detail of what life was really like for sailors and officers alike, serving on board the Royal Navy's warships in the early years of the nineteenth century. Published in conjunction with the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, one of the world's finest Naval museums, this detailed exploration into life on board the English warships captures the drama, hardships, discipline, and danger of sailing into battle. Includes information on the French and Spanish navies, and an outline of Nelson's career and main battles. The Construction and Fitting of the English Man of War: 1650-1850
Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy From the decision to build six heavy frigates, through the cliffhanger campaign against Tripoli to the war that shook the world in 1812, Toll tells this grand tale with the political insight of "Founding Brothers" and a narrative flair worthy of Patrick O'Brian. Abridged. 5 CDs. New Vanguard 79: American Heavy Frigates 1794-1826 1812: The Navy's War George C. Daughan Perilous Fight: America's Intrepid War with Britain on the High Seas, 1812-1815 (Vintage) Stephen Budiansky Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper: 4 pages with Story and 6 prints. The U.S. Steam Frigate Niagara. May 2, 1857
	Marked for Misfortune: An Epic Tale of Shipwreck, Human Endeavour and Survival in the Age of Sail Jean Hood In the August of 1792 the East Indiaman Winterton, with her precious cargo of 300,000 silver dollars, was wrecked on a reef off Madagascar. As the ship broke up, the 300 crew and passengers clung to pieces of wreckage, eventually to be washed up, exhausted, on the beach. More than 40 of them perished in the surf. John Dale, the second senior surviving officer, rigged up the ship's yawl and set off with six officers to fetch help. But his efforts were marred by tragedy and misfortune. By the time he returned, alone, seven months later malaria had wiped out almost half the original survivors. War had since broken out between England and France, and on route to Madras the group was captured and imprisoned on Mauritius before finally gaining passage to India, while Dale himself was impressed into service on a French privateer, liberated by the Dutch and then taken prisoner again by the French, before reaching English shores more than two years after he had first set sail. Jean Hood has chronicled a fascinating episode in maritime history, which has all the more resonance for being rooted in the quiet heroism, the dignity, the suffering and courage of the sailors and passengers, men, women and children whose fate it was to board the 'doomed' Winterton.
The film Master and Commander brings the realities of life in the Navy at the time of the Napoleonic wars to a whole new audience. Based on the first of the best-selling Aubrey/Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian (published in the USA by W.W. Norton), and starring Oscar winner Russell Crowe, Men o'War provides the background to the story, with detail of what life was really like for sailors and officers alike, serving on board the Royal Navy's warships in the early years of the nineteenth century. Published in conjunction with the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, one of the world's finest Naval museums, this detailed exploration into life on board the English warships captures the drama, hardships, discipline, and danger of sailing into battle as we approach the bicentennial of Nelson's victory at Trafalgar in 1805. Including information on the French and Spanish navies, and an outline of Nelson's career and main battles, Men o'War is a complete account of the real world behind the fiction.
A Story of Courage, Community, and War Nathaniel Philbrick's history of the Plymouth Colony details five decades of struggle between the Pilgrims and the Native Americans, which began with tentative attempts at mutual accommodation, but which lead up to the bloody encounter known as King Philip's War. Philbrick brings to life the Pilgrims and their leaders Miles Standish and William Bradford, as he conveys how central their religion was to their lives. He tells how Native Americans, under Chief Massasoit, struggled not just with the new arrivals, but also with the disease they brought, which decimated the Indians. Philbrick disassembles many myths that have grown up around this historic period, and he shows how this period established the pattern for troubled relations between Indians and settlers for centuries to come. New York Times Notable Book of the Year, 2006. The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World, Nathaniel Philbrick The Mayflower and Her Log, July 15, 1620-May 6, 1621 - Complete
Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Harvard Historical Studies, 133) Alison Games. Harvard University Press England's seventeenth-century colonial empire in North America and the Caribbean was created by migration. The quickening pace of this essential migration is captured in the London port register of 1635, the largest extant port register for any single year in the colonial period and unique in its record of migration to America and to the European continent. Alison Games analyzes the 7,500 people who traveled from London in that year, recreating individual careers, exploring colonial societies at a time of emerging viability, and delineating a world sustained and defined by migration. The colonial travelers were bound for the major regions of English settlement--New England, the Chesapeake, the West Indies, and Bermuda--and included ministers, governors, soldiers, planters, merchants, and members of some major colonial dynasties--Winthrops, Saltonstalls, and Eliots. Many of these passengers were indentured servants. Games shows that however much they tried, the travelers from London were unable to recreate England in their overseas outposts. They dwelled in chaotic, precarious, and hybrid societies where New World exigencies overpowered the force of custom. Patterns of repeat and return migration cemented these inchoate colonial outposts into a larger Atlantic community. Together, the migrants' stories offer a new social history of the seventeenth century. For the origins and integration of the English Atlantic world, Games illustrates the primary importance of the first half of the seventeenth century.
A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Robert Kerr A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels - Volume 01 Arranged in Systematic Order: Forming a Complete History of the Origin and Progress . . . from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time, Robert Kerr A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels - Volume 15 Forming A Complete History Of The Origin And Progress Of Navigation, Discovery, And ... From The Earliest Ages To The Present Time Generally, these books are without illustrations or index, but the information is invaluable for researchers and historians.
A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten Julie Winch's full-length biography of James Forten, a hero of African American history, presents the story of one of the most remarkable men in 19th-century America. Born into a free black family in 1766, Forten served in the Revolutionary War as a teenager. By 1810 he had earned the distinction of being the leading sailmaker in Philadelphia. Soon after Forten emerged as a leader in Philadelphia's black community and was active in a wide range of reform activities. Especially prominent in national and international antislavery movements, he served as vice-president of the American Anti-Slavery Society and became close friends with William Lloyd Garrison to whom he lent money to start up the Liberator. His family were all active abolitionists and a granddaughter, Charlotte Forten, published a famous diary of her experiences teaching ex-slaves in South Carolina's Sea Islands during the Civil War. This is the first serious biography of Forten, who stands beside Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King, Jr., in the pantheon of African Americans who fundamentally shaped American history.
Command at Sea: Naval Command and Control since the Sixteenth Century Michael A. Palmer Palmer observes five centuries of dramatic encounters under sail and steam. From reliance on signal flags in the seventeenth century to satellite communications in the twenty-first, admirals looked to the next advance in technology as the one that would allow them to control their forces. But while abilities to communicate improved, Palmer shows how other technologies simultaneously shrank admirals' windows of decision. The result was simple, if not obvious: naval commanders have never had sufficient means or time to direct subordinates in battle.
Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories. Simon Winchester I have heard Simon Winchester speak at Book Passage in Corte Madera; he is a GREAT raconteur and his writing reflects that. If you read only one book of the sea, this might be the one to read. Blending history and anecdote, geography and reminiscence, science and exposition, the New York Times bestselling author of Krakatoa tells the breathtaking saga of the magnificent Atlantic Ocean, setting it against the backdrop of mankind's intellectual evolution Until a thousand years ago, no humans ventured into the Atlantic or imagined traversing its vast infinity. But once the first daring mariners successfully navigated to far shores'whether it was the Vikings, the Irish, the Chinese, Christopher Columbus in the north, or the Portuguese and the Spanish in the south Atlantic evolved in the world's growing consciousness of itself as an enclosed body of water bounded by the Americas to the West, and by Europe and Africa to the East. Atlantic is a biography of this immense space, of a sea which has defined and determined so much about the lives of the millions who live beside or near its tens of thousands of miles of coast. The Atlantic has been central to the ambitions of explorers, scientists and warriors, and it continues to affect our character, attitudes, and dreams. Poets to potentates, seers to sailors, fishermen to foresters'all have a relationship with this great body of blue-green sea and regard her as friend or foe, adversary or ally, depending on circumstance or fortune. Simon Winchester chronicles that relationship, making the Atlantic come vividly alive. Spanning from the earth's geological origins to the age of exploration, World War II battles to modern pollution, his narrative is epic and awe-inspiring.
How History's Greatest Pirates Pillaged, Plundered, and Got Away With It: The Stories, Techniques, and Tactics of the Most Feared Sea Rovers from 1500-1800 More than simple retellings of the tried and true stories of buccaneers on the high seas, this book focuses on how pirating tactics of the 1500s through 1800s to give the reader a view of how pirates functioned through history. Follow eighteen of the most famous pirates in detail as they raid major ships and pillage coastal villages. Learn how the pirates approached such invasions and how they managed to elude authorities and sometimes whole navies. With archival images gathered from around the world. Each chapter is a stand-alone story about a famous buccaneer and follows them moment by moment on a specific attack as an example of their greater techniques and tactics for plundering. Readers will follow the characters in live action and trace their movements in real time; a recreation of the action based on the historic information available.
An Ocean Free-lance: From A Privateersman's Log, 1812 William Clark Russell This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

	The Life of Frederick Marryat Book One of the Marryat Cycle: 1792-1848 (Non-fiction) David Hannay Captain Frederick Marryat served in the British Navy. Captain Marryat ranks alongside the greatest, most colorful story tellers with his tale of Peter Simple, who, as the least-brightest of a large family, is sent to sea. His novels provide first-hand detail to life at sea.

World History

Reimers' thoughtful history recognizes the ambiguity and subjectivity of race, noting that individuals often define themselves more complexly than census forms allow. However classified, record numbers of immigrants are streaming to the United States and creating the most diverse society in the world.

Other Immigrants: The Global Origins of the American People

David Reimers
Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians represent three of every four immigrants who arrived in the United States after 1970. Yet despite their large numbers and long history of movement to America, non-Europeans are conspicuously absent from many books about immigration.

In Other Immigrants, David M. Reimers offers the first comprehensive account of non-European immigration, chronicling the compelling and diverse stories of frequently overlooked Americans. Reimers traces the early history of Black, Hispanic, and Asian immigrants from the fifteenth century through World War II, when racial hostility led to the virtual exclusion of Asians and aggression towards Blacks and Hispanics. He then tells the story of post-1945 immigration, when these groups dominated the immigration statistics and began to reshape American society.

The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805

Richard Zacks

In this national bestseller, acclaimed historian Zacks brings the true story of the unheralded American -- William Eaton -- who brought the Barbary pirates to their knees.

The carpenters who built the USS Philadelphia, in addition to their craft skills, demonstrated an extraordinary capacity, for alcohol. The project overseer, a Thomas FitzSimons, noted in his expense accounts that he had purchased 110 gallons of rum a month for thirty carpenters. Sober math reveals that each man working six days a week consumed about a pint of ruin a day. (8-page photo section.)

Image Burning of the USS Philadelphia in the harbor of Tripoli, 1897. Edward Moran, Artist.

Click for a Selection of Books on Lighthouses Around the World for Kids and Adults: West Coast and East Coast United States, Ireland, South Africa, the Carolinas, mid-Atlantic floating lighthouses, Inland lakes . . .

Unlike many other countries, France has resisted the trend toward total automation, and in many small ports and seaside towns, the lighthouse keeper is still a well known and respected figure. World renowned lighthouse photographer Jean Guichard's famously dramatic photographs of storms at sea illustrate the perilous working conditions the lighthouse keepers face, and the text by Rene Gast provides a fascinating glimpse into the daily lives of these men and women, whose determination and nerves of steel have saved countless lives over the centuries. Even the workmen who built these technological marvels risked their lives with every wave, and had to be strapped bellydown on the rock to avoid being washed away. Today, the job still requires a great deal of nerve where keepers are still winched down to the deck of the relief boat by hand, dangling from ropes over crashing seas. The book also contains reproductions of a number of historical documents about lighthouses.

Please click here to review an extensive selection of books on Sea History, including:

A History of Sea Power
Admiralty and Maritime Laws in the Mediterranean Sea
Tongataboo
Ancient Greeks
Beyond the Windswept Dunes
Black Sea
Britain and the Sea
Colliers Across the Sea
and many more, such as those below . . .

Author Roger Crowley is a UK-based writer and historian and a graduate of Cambridge University. As the child of a naval family, his fascination with the Mediterranean world started early, on the island of Malta. He has lived in Istanbul, walked across much of western Turkey, and traveled widely throughout the region. His particular interests are the Byzantine, Venetian, and Ottoman empires, seafaring, and eyewitness history. He is the author of three books on the empires of the Mediterranean and its surroundings: 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West (2005), Empires of the Sea (2008) and City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas (2012).

Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World

Roger Crowley
In 1521, Suleiman the Magnificent, Muslim ruler of the Ottoman Empire, dispatched an invasion fleet to the Christian island of Rhodes. This would prove to be the opening shot in an epic clash between rival empires and faiths for control of the Mediterranean and the center of the world. In Empires of the Sea, acclaimed historian Roger Crowley has written a thrilling account of this brutal decades-long battle between Christendom and Islam for the soul of Europe, a fast-paced tale of spiraling intensity that ranges from Istanbul to the Gates of Gibraltar. Crowley conjures up a wild cast of pirates, crusaders, and religious warriors struggling for supremacy and survival in a tale of slavery and galley warfare, desperate bravery and utter brutality. Empires of the Sea is a story of extraordinary color and incident, and provides a crucial context for our own clash of civilizations.

Men O' War, The Illustrated Story of Life in Nelson's Navy

The film Master and Commander (Fox, summer 2003) brought to life the realities of life in the Navy at the time of the Napoleonic wars. Based on the first of the best-selling Aubrey/Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian, and starring Oscar winner Russell Crowe, Men o'War provides the background to the story, with detail of what life was really like for sailors and officers alike, serving on board the Royal Navy's warships in the early years of the nineteenth century. Published in conjunction with the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, one of the world's finest Naval museums, this detailed exploration into life on board the English warships captures the drama, hardships, discipline, and danger of sailing into battle. Includes information on the French and Spanish navies, and an outline of Nelson's career and main battles.

The Construction and Fitting of the English Man of War: 1650-1850

Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy

From the decision to build six heavy frigates, through the cliffhanger campaign against Tripoli to the war that shook the world in 1812, Toll tells this grand tale with the political insight of "Founding Brothers" and a narrative flair worthy of Patrick O'Brian. Abridged. 5 CDs.

New Vanguard 79: American Heavy Frigates 1794-1826

1812: The Navy's War

George C. Daughan

Perilous Fight: America's Intrepid War with Britain on the High Seas, 1812-1815 (Vintage)

Stephen Budiansky

Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper: 4 pages with Story and 6 prints. The U.S. Steam Frigate Niagara. May 2, 1857

Marked for Misfortune: An Epic Tale of Shipwreck, Human Endeavour and Survival in the Age of Sail

Jean Hood
In the August of 1792 the East Indiaman Winterton, with her precious cargo of 300,000 silver dollars, was wrecked on a reef off Madagascar. As the ship broke up, the 300 crew and passengers clung to pieces of wreckage, eventually to be washed up, exhausted, on the beach. More than 40 of them perished in the surf. John Dale, the second senior surviving officer, rigged up the ship's yawl and set off with six officers to fetch help. But his efforts were marred by tragedy and misfortune. By the time he returned, alone, seven months later malaria had wiped out almost half the original survivors. War had since broken out between England and France, and on route to Madras the group was captured and imprisoned on Mauritius before finally gaining passage to India, while Dale himself was impressed into service on a French privateer, liberated by the Dutch and then taken prisoner again by the French, before reaching English shores more than two years after he had first set sail. Jean Hood has chronicled a fascinating episode in maritime history, which has all the more resonance for being rooted in the quiet heroism, the dignity, the suffering and courage of the sailors and passengers, men, women and children whose fate it was to board the 'doomed' Winterton.

The film Master and Commander brings the realities of life in the Navy at the time of the Napoleonic wars to a whole new audience. Based on the first of the best-selling Aubrey/Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian (published in the USA by W.W. Norton), and starring Oscar winner Russell Crowe, Men o'War provides the background to the story, with detail of what life was really like for sailors and officers alike, serving on board the Royal Navy's warships in the early years of the nineteenth century. Published in conjunction with the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, one of the world's finest Naval museums, this detailed exploration into life on board the English warships captures the drama, hardships, discipline, and danger of sailing into battle as we approach the bicentennial of Nelson's victory at Trafalgar in 1805. Including information on the French and Spanish navies, and an outline of Nelson's career and main battles, Men o'War is a complete account of the real world behind the fiction.

A Story of Courage, Community, and War

Nathaniel Philbrick's history of the Plymouth Colony details five decades of struggle between the Pilgrims and the Native Americans, which began with tentative attempts at mutual accommodation, but which lead up to the bloody encounter known as King Philip's War. Philbrick brings to life the Pilgrims and their leaders Miles Standish and William Bradford, as he conveys how central their religion was to their lives. He tells how Native Americans, under Chief Massasoit, struggled not just with the new arrivals, but also with the disease they brought, which decimated the Indians. Philbrick disassembles many myths that have grown up around this historic period, and he shows how this period established the pattern for troubled relations between Indians and settlers for centuries to come.
New York Times Notable Book of the Year, 2006.

The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World, Nathaniel Philbrick

The Mayflower and Her Log, July 15, 1620-May 6, 1621 - Complete

Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Harvard Historical Studies, 133)

Alison Games. Harvard University Press
England's seventeenth-century colonial empire in North America and the Caribbean was created by migration. The quickening pace of this essential migration is captured in the London port register of 1635, the largest extant port register for any single year in the colonial period and unique in its record of migration to America and to the European continent. Alison Games analyzes the 7,500 people who traveled from London in that year, recreating individual careers, exploring colonial societies at a time of emerging viability, and delineating a world sustained and defined by migration.

The colonial travelers were bound for the major regions of English settlement--New England, the Chesapeake, the West Indies, and Bermuda--and included ministers, governors, soldiers, planters, merchants, and members of some major colonial dynasties--Winthrops, Saltonstalls, and Eliots. Many of these passengers were indentured servants. Games shows that however much they tried, the travelers from London were unable to recreate England in their overseas outposts. They dwelled in chaotic, precarious, and hybrid societies where New World exigencies overpowered the force of custom. Patterns of repeat and return migration cemented these inchoate colonial outposts into a larger Atlantic community. Together, the migrants' stories offer a new social history of the seventeenth century. For the origins and integration of the English Atlantic world, Games illustrates the primary importance of the first half of the seventeenth century.

A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Robert Kerr

A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels - Volume 01 Arranged in Systematic Order: Forming a Complete History of the Origin and Progress . . . from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time, Robert Kerr

A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels - Volume 15 Forming A Complete History Of The Origin And Progress Of Navigation, Discovery, And ... From The Earliest Ages To The Present Time

Generally, these books are without illustrations or index, but the information is invaluable for researchers and historians.

A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten
Julie Winch's full-length biography of James Forten, a hero of African American history, presents the story of one of the most remarkable men in 19th-century America. Born into a free black family in 1766, Forten served in the Revolutionary War as a teenager. By 1810 he had earned the distinction of being the leading sailmaker in Philadelphia. Soon after Forten emerged as a leader in Philadelphia's black community and was active in a wide range of reform activities. Especially prominent in national and international antislavery movements, he served as vice-president of the American Anti-Slavery Society and became close friends with William Lloyd Garrison to whom he lent money to start up the Liberator. His family were all active abolitionists and a granddaughter, Charlotte Forten, published a famous diary of her experiences teaching ex-slaves in South Carolina's Sea Islands during the Civil War. This is the first serious biography of Forten, who stands beside Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King, Jr., in the pantheon of African Americans who fundamentally shaped American history.

Command at Sea: Naval Command and Control since the Sixteenth Century
Michael A. Palmer
Palmer observes five centuries of dramatic encounters under sail and steam. From reliance on signal flags in the seventeenth century to satellite communications in the twenty-first, admirals looked to the next advance in technology as the one that would allow them to control their forces. But while abilities to communicate improved, Palmer shows how other technologies simultaneously shrank admirals' windows of decision.

The result was simple, if not obvious: naval commanders have never had sufficient means or time to direct subordinates in battle.

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories. Simon Winchester

I have heard Simon Winchester speak at Book Passage in Corte Madera; he is a GREAT raconteur and his writing reflects that. If you read only one book of the sea, this might be the one to read.

Blending history and anecdote, geography and reminiscence, science and exposition, the New York Times bestselling author of Krakatoa tells the breathtaking saga of the magnificent Atlantic Ocean, setting it against the backdrop of mankind's intellectual evolution Until a thousand years ago, no humans ventured into the Atlantic or imagined traversing its vast infinity. But once the first daring mariners successfully navigated to far shores'whether it was the Vikings, the Irish, the Chinese, Christopher Columbus in the north, or the Portuguese and the Spanish in the south Atlantic evolved in the world's growing consciousness of itself as an enclosed body of water bounded by the Americas to the West, and by Europe and Africa to the East. Atlantic is a biography of this immense space, of a sea which has defined and determined so much about the lives of the millions who live beside or near its tens of thousands of miles of coast. The Atlantic has been central to the ambitions of explorers, scientists and warriors, and it continues to affect our character, attitudes, and dreams. Poets to potentates, seers to sailors, fishermen to foresters'all have a relationship with this great body of blue-green sea and regard her as friend or foe, adversary or ally, depending on circumstance or fortune. Simon Winchester chronicles that relationship, making the Atlantic come vividly alive. Spanning from the earth's geological origins to the age of exploration, World War II battles to modern pollution, his narrative is epic and awe-inspiring.

How History's Greatest Pirates Pillaged, Plundered, and Got Away With It: The Stories, Techniques, and Tactics of the Most Feared Sea Rovers from 1500-1800

More than simple retellings of the tried and true stories of buccaneers on the high seas, this book focuses on how pirating tactics of the 1500s through 1800s to give the reader a view of how pirates functioned through history.

Follow eighteen of the most famous pirates in detail as they raid major ships and pillage coastal villages. Learn how the pirates approached such invasions and how they managed to elude authorities and sometimes whole navies. With archival images gathered from around the world.

Each chapter is a stand-alone story about a famous buccaneer and follows them moment by moment on a specific attack as an example of their greater techniques and tactics for plundering. Readers will follow the characters in live action and trace their movements in real time; a recreation of the action based on the historic information available.

An Ocean Free-lance: From A Privateersman's Log, 1812

William Clark Russell

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

The Privateersman Classics of Naval Fiction by Captain Frederick Marryat.

The Life of Frederick Marryat

Book One of the Marryat Cycle: 1792-1848

(Non-fiction)
David Hannay
Captain Frederick Marryat served in the British Navy. Captain Marryat ranks alongside the greatest, most colorful story tellers with his tale of Peter Simple, who, as the least-brightest of a large family, is sent to sea. His novels provide first-hand detail to life at sea.