Description
Book SynopsisHow three white, non-elite American sailors turned their experiences of captivity into diverse career opportunitiesand influenced America's physical, commercial, ideological, and diplomatic development. Winner of the John Lyman Book Award by the North American Society for Oceanic HistoryFrom 1784 to 1815, hundreds of American sailors were held as white slaves in the North African Barbary States. In From Captives to Consuls, Brett Goodin vividly traces the lives of three of these menRichard O'Brien, James Cathcart, and James Rileyfrom the Atlantic coast during the American Revolution to North Africa, from Philadelphia to the Louisiana Territories, and finally to the western frontier. This first scholarly biography of American captives in Barbary sifts through their highly curated writings to reveal how ordinary individuals in extraordinary circumstances could maneuver through and contribute to nation building in early America, all the while advancing their own interests. The three sub
Trade ReviewGoodin's book is a contribution to American cultural history, especially of the dynamic and fluid period of the early republic, more than about cultural interchange between North Africa and the United States. His subjects are idiosyncratic, making it hard to draw too many conclusions about their lives and importance to America history.
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History AustraliaTable of ContentsSeries Editor's Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Victims of American Independence?
Chapter One. Farmers, Privateers, and Prisoners of the Revolution
Chapter Two. Diaries of Barbary Orientalism and American Masculinity in Algiers
Chapter Three. Captivity by Correspondence
Chapter Four. From Captives to Consuls and Coup-Makers
Chapter Five. Accidentally Useful and Interesting to the World
Chapter Six. Sailing the Inland Sea
Conclusion. Opportunities of Empire
Epilogue
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index
