In 1844 the USS Yorktown sailed from New York, as part of the U.S. Navy's newly established African Squadron, to interdict slave ships leaving the African coast. Aboard the sloop of war, Master's Mate John C. Lawrence, an educated New Yorker in his early twenties, kept a private journal describing what happened during the extraordinary two-year voyage and his reactions ...
Following the success of his first book about a U.S. Navy flight crew's desperate battle to survive a 1978 ditching in the icy north Pacific, Andrew Jampoler has turned to an equally exciting Navy adventure set in the desert of Ottoman Syria more than one hundred fifty years ago. Ordered to fix the exact elevation of the Dead Sea and ...
Every aspect of the common sailor's life in the Union navy—from recruiting, clothing, training, shipboard routine, entertainment, and wages to diet, health, and combat experience—is addressed in this study, the first to examine the subject in rich detail. The wealth of new facts it provides allows the reader to take a fresh look at nineteenth-century social history, including issues like ...