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Bill Thayer |
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Allan Nevins was a historian and journalist who taught for thirty years at Columbia University and published more than 50 books, mostly on 19c American history: he is best known for his biographies of Grover Cleveland, Hamilton Fish, Lincoln, and John D. Rockefeller and for his 8‑volume work on the War Between the States. Good detailed information on his career can be found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, of course.
The book before you, while solid and pleasantly written, runs only a hundred pages and is one of his lesser works; it appears to have been commissioned by the United States Lines for the specific purpose of highlighting the importance of the merchant marine — something which continues to be very relevant today, when once again the United States relies on foreign shippers to supply the country, a dangerous situation as pointed out by Nevins thruout the book.
My transcription is dedicated to my friend Scott,
whom I never think of as a former merchant mariner. . . .
Foreword |
[3] | |
In the Good Old Colony Times |
7 | |
The Young Republic |
22 | |
The Half-Century of Neglect |
44 | |
The First World War Emergency |
60 | |
At Last: An Adequate Policy |
74 | |
Frontiers of the Seven Seas |
87 | |
A Shelf of Nautical Books |
103 |
[Frontispiece] The American Clipper David Crockett |
6 |
Early Print of Small Craft Entering Boston Harbor |
9 |
Old Print of Arctic Whaling |
13 |
The Triangular Trade |
15 |
Shipyards on New York's East River |
16 |
Paul Jones shooting a Sailor who had attempted to strike his Colours in an Engagement |
20 |
South Street, New York, 1800 |
26 |
The Constitution and the Java, December 29, 1812 |
28 |
From the New York Tribune, April 26, 1841 |
32 |
The American Packet Ship Roscius, 1838 |
33 |
The British Steamship Great Western, 1838 |
34 |
The American Clipper Sovereign of the Seas, 1859 |
38 |
One of the Perils of Whaling |
39 |
San Francisco, 1851 |
43 |
Western Railroad Construction Scene |
47 |
The Steamship Baltic When New |
49 |
President Harrison Raising the New House Flag of the American Line, February 22, 1893 |
52 |
The S. S. City of New York, 1893 |
53 |
President and Mrs. Cleveland at the Launching of the St. Louis |
54 |
The Liner Vaterland as the U. S. Troop Transport Leviathan |
61 |
Shipyard at Hog Island, Philadelphia, World War I |
68 |
War-Built Ships Rotting in the Hudson River in 1920 |
72 |
The Turbo-Electric Liner, California, Built in 1927 |
76 |
The Cabin Liner, Washington, Launched by the U. S. Lines in 1932 |
77 |
Three Freighters Designed and Built Under the Maritime Commission Program of 1937: C1 (top); C2 (middle); (C3 (lower) |
85 |
The S. S. America, 1940 |
88 |
The S. S. America as the U. S. Troop Transport West Point, 1945 |
88 |
The First Liberty Ship, the Patrick Henry |
92 |
A Victory Ship, an Improvement over the Liberty Design |
95 |
"The success of overseas operations . . . has depended upon the availability of shipping and the ability to keep it moving." |
98 |
The edition followed in this transcription was that of my own hard copy, published by the United States Lines, 1946. The 1946 copyright was not renewed in 1973 or 1974 as then required by law in order to be maintained. The work is thus in the public domain; details here on the copyright law involved.
The 33 illustrations (14 photographs, 18 engravings and lithographs, and a sketch map) were all printed in sepia-toned monochrome, matching the mid-level headings and the occasional decorative delimiter; I've recolorized them in navy blue like the images elsewhere on my Maritime History site.
The captions, which of course I've reproduced verbatim, include no provenance; but on the colophon page (where we are also told that the book was designed and printed by Green, Dunn & Company, New York, N. Y., and printed in the U. S. A.) provenance is given for some of the illustrations. I've folded that information into the captioning.
For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57 these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.
In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the authors' own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.
As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if successful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)
My transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.
The printed book was very well proofread; three minor typographical errors are marked with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the bullet or the underscored words to read what was actually printed. Similarly, underscored measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., 10 miles.
A number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked.
Any overlooked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a copy of the printed book in front of you.
The icon I use to indicate this subsite is the vignette on the cover of my copy, depicting of course the modern merchant marine of 1946 guided by the ghost of its sailing-ship ancestor.
Images with borders lead to more information.
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A page or image on this site is in the public domain ONLY if its URL has a total of one *asterisk. If the URL has two **asterisks, the item is copyright someone else, and used by permission or fair use. If the URL has none the item is © Bill Thayer. See my copyright page for details and contact information. |
Site updated: 19 Dec 21