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.