"A compelling account based on exhaustive primary research that re-creates the mindset of politicians, the press, and other policymakers as they make the momentous decision to go to war in 1917. Many know the maritime military dimensions of warfare--here is a story that shows the maritime dimensions of diplomacy and how the rights of American merchant marines mattered in the minds of those in charge."--Timothy G. Lynch, California Maritime Academy
"Scholarly yet accessible, a nice piece of research, especially in primary documents. This is a highly original book on a relatively neglected...

A classic of its type the closest comparison is the legendary Weibust s Deep Sea Sailors, and I would hazard to suggest that this book may come to hold a similarly important place in the scholarship of maritime ethnography. Joseph Flatman, author of Ships and Shipbuilding in Medieval Manuscripts

This innovative study provides an important analysis of Anglo-American mariners attitudes toward death, the dead, and commemoration. It will be valuable to all interested in historic maritime culture and mortuary practices, and reveals a distinctive mariner subculture which also...

It is Van Tilburg s goal to broaden our understanding of Chinese nautical technology, to explore the evolution of Chinese vessels between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, to investigate the differences between Chinese and Western ships and, in the absence of historical documents, to read the vessels themselves as cultural artefacts sic] or texts that contain historical information regarding their construction and functions that would otherwise be lost to history. International Journal of Maritime History This monograph is rather unusual, not because it deals with...

Opens the door to one of the least known areas of naval warfare in World War II. Highly recommended. Ships Monthly Novak tells the sort of war story that rarely makes it into the history books but deserves to be remembered. Journal of Military History To anyone wishing to know more about World War II, this diary adds dimension to the broader context of the war in general, and the North in particular, as well as into Canadian-American wartime relations . . . No history of war is complete without the men and women who fought in the proverbial and literal trenches.Though they were...

United States Maritime Literature Award

One of the Coast Guard's great heroes and the secret he kept hidden"This is a book of adventure that tells how one man shaped the Alaskan frontier at a crucial time in American history."--Vincent William Patton, Master Chief Petty Officer of the Coast Guard, retired"Diligent research and precise writing reveal the realities of race relations in nineteenth-century America, as well as the dangers, loneliness, and complex relationships of life at sea in that era."--Bernard C. Nalty, author of Strength for the Fight: A History of Black Americans...

The USS Saginaw was a Civil War gunboat that served in Pacific and Asian waters between 1860 and 1870. During this decade, the crew witnessed the trade disruptions of the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion, the transportation of Confederate sailors to Central America, the French intervention in Mexico, and the growing presence of American naval forces in Hawaii.In 1870, the ship sank at one of the world's most remote coral reefs; her crew was rescued sixty-eight days later after a dramatic open-boat voyage. More than 130 years later, Hans Van Tilburg led the team that discovered and recorded...