The Way of the Ship: America's Maritime History Reenvisoned, 1600-2000
AN ENLIGHTENING, EXPANDED VIEW OF AMERICAN MARITIME HISTORY
From Native Americans with birch bark canoes and inventive colonists who took fishing shallops and laid decks over them for coastal trading to the rise of the automated mass carrier and ever-bigger passenger cruise ships, this book tells the story of four hundred years of America’s maritime history. It is filled with powerful and evocative images of ships such as the Mayflower, Savannah, Flying Cloud, Alabama, Sea-Land McLean, and Exxon Valdez; ports, including Boston, New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Salem, Buffalo, and Seattle; and people such as Joseph Peabody, Robert Fulton, Mark Twain, Donald McKay, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, and Malcom McLean.
The Way of the Ship offers a global perspective and considers both oceanic shipping and domestic shipping along America’s coasts and inland waterways, with explanations of the forces that influenced the way of the ship. The result is an eye-opening, authoritative look at American maritime history and the ways it helped shape the nation’s history.
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Book details
- Author
- Alex Roland
- Imprint
- Trade Paper Press, an imprint of Turner Publishing Company
- Published
- Formats
- Hardcover, Paperback
- Subjects
- Transportation › Ships & Boats › History
History › United States - Topics
- American maritime history · shipping history · inland waterways · merchant marines · United States ports · naval history · colonial America · 400 years of seafaring
- ISBN-13
- 9781684421497 (Hardcover)9781684421503 (Paperback)
About the author
ALEX ROLAND is Professor of History Emeritus at Duke University, where he taught military history and the history of technology. His recent books include Strategic Computing: DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence, 1983–1993, Model Research: The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, 1915–1958 and Underwater Warfare in the Age of Sail.
Roland received the Society for the History of Technology’s 2023 Leonardo da Vinci Medal. He earned his Ph.D. in History from Duke University in 1974, served as a historian with NASA from 1973 to 1981, and held both the Harold K. Johnson Chair of Military History at the U.S. Army War College and the Dr. Leo Shifrin Chair of Naval-Military History at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Alex lives in Durham, North Carolina.