Description
Book SynopsisBrian Rouleau argues that because of their ubiquity in foreign ports, American sailors were the principal agents of overseas foreign relations in the early republic.
Trade ReviewWith Sails Whitening Every Sea challenges a popular view concerning the romance of American maritime history. It examines this image through the lens of sociology and effectively casts nostalgia and sentimentality upon the rocks of ruthless racist reality.... [T]his is a valuable book worthy of being added to any maritime historian's library.
-- Louis Arthur Norton * The Northern Mariner *
Brian Rouleau's book is an important addition to the growing field of literature and scholarship that seeks to more completely assess the role of American mariners in the Early Republic.
-- Timothy G. Lynch * Sea History *
Rouleau has crafted an impressive reimagining of working-class seafarers that places them at the heart of the American encounter with the world in the early and mid-nineteenth century.... Rouleau's straightforward arguments, imaginative research, wit, and strength as a writer made this work an uncommonly pleasant read.
-- Joshua M. Smith * Journal of American History *
Rouleau points out—provocatively and persuasively—that much of what antebellum Americans knew of the world was filtered 'through maritime mediation' (p. 34). Seafarers’ letters, memoirs and reports from abroad were not just the stuff of later romanticized remembrances of the ‘days of sail’; rather, they were essential sources of commercial and ethnographic information as the American imagination chased American commerce around the globe.... With Sails Whitening Every Sea handles well the tremendous complexity of the subject matter. All of the categories discussed—gender, race, class—were moving targets, all the more so at sea, and historians are richer for Rouleau’s careful and sophisticated examination of his subject.
-- Matthew Taylor Raffety * International Journal of Maritime History *
The major strength of Rouleau's work is that he does not limit his scope to either the Pacific or Atlantic. Instead he sets out to examine a global maritime empire.
-- Antony Adler * H-War *
Brian Rouleau's new book forces us to reconsider the ways in which foreign relations work. Ordinary people, it turns out, have had an enormous impact on international affairs. Rouleau's provocative book explains how common maritime laborers shaped the contours of America's entanglements with foreign peoples during the nineteenth century. Rouleau has a true talent for seeing the larger dimensions of everyday interactions.
-- Christopher P. Magra * Diplomatic History *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: "Born to Rule the Seas"1. Schoolhouses Afloat2. Jim Crow Girdles the Globe3. Maritime Destiny as Manifest Destiny4. A Maritime Empire of Moral Depravity5. An Intimate History of Early America's Maritime Empire6. Making Do at the Margins of Maritime EmpireEpilogue: Out of the Sailor’s Den, into the Tourist TrapNotes
Index
