America and the Sea
Subtitle: A Maritime History (American Maritime Library)
Publisher: Mystic Seaport Museum Publications
Published: June 28, 1998
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 696
ISBN-13: 9780913372814
Subjects: Maritime History; Water Transportation; Shipping; History - General History; United States - General; Transportation; USA; Ships & Shipbuilding - General; General; History; Merchant marine; Merchant ships; United States
First sentence: "THE SEA IS ALL ABOUT US," wrote T.S. Eliot in "The Dry Salvages"; "the sea is the land's edge also."
Description: America and the Sea: A Maritime History is the most comprehensive maritime history of the United States available today. Spanning the centuries from Native American and Viking maritime activities before Columbus through today's maritime enterprise, the text provides a new history of the U.S. from the fundamental perspective of the sea that surrounds it, and the rivers and lakes that link its vast interior to the seacoast.

It is a story that affects us all, often in surprising ways, a story that explains much about the nation and its people today.

America and the Sea is gratefully written by six prominent scholars in the field, whose individual areas of historical research and teaching range from labor to technology, fisheries, and the U.S. Navy. Informed by their long experience teaching together in the Munson Institute at Mystic Seaport, they incorporate considerations of art, literature, and poetry along with their discussions of the economic, political, diplomatic, and technological foundations of American maritime history.

Their narrative treatment is punctuated and augmented with quotations from period documents and particularly with brief essays by some noted young scholars that add insight and expand on the human dimensions of America's relationship with the sea.