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A personal account of Commodore Perry’s landmark expedition to Japan and life in the antebellum navy George B. Gideon Jr. served as second assistant engineer aboard the USS Powhatan from 1852 to 1856. From his position on the steam frigate, Gideon traveled to Singapore, Labuan, Borneo, Hong Kong, and many other Asian lands. During his time at sea, Gideon penned dozens of letters to his wife, Lide, back home in Philadelphia. Recently discovered in the attic of his great-great-grandniece, were fifty-one letters penned by Gideon providing thorough and insightful commentary throughout the voyage. Through these correspondences, Gideon laboriously documents the details of his daily life on board, from the food they ate to the technical aspects of his work, as well as observations concerning the historical events unfolding around him, such as Chinese piracy, the Taiping Rebellion, the Crimean War, and the devastation of Shimoda. To My Dearest Wife, Lide: Letters from George B. Gideon Jr. during Commodore Perry’s Expedition to Japan, 1853–1855 is a rare first-person account of the landmark American naval expedition to Japan to establish commercial relations between the two countries. Gideon’s letters have been meticulously transcribed and annotated by the editors and are an invaluable primary historical source. Gideon’s letters are candid and revealing, delving into the rampant dysfunction in the navy of the 1850s—sickness and disease, alcohol abuse, and poor leadership, among other challenges. Gideon also unabashedly shares his own cynical views of the navy’s role in supporting American economic interests in Japan. This firsthand account of the political mission of the Perry expedition is a unique contribution to naval and military history and gives readers a better view of life aboard a navy ship.
The history of thought and thinking in the American South is now alive with curiosity and poised for a new maturity. Thanks to the efforts of a growing variety of critics, the region is increasingly understood as a cultural habitat comprised of flows of ideas and sensibilities that originate both inside and outside traditional boundaries. This volume of essays uniquely combines perspectives from historians and literary scholars to explore a wide spectrum of thought about a region long understood as distinctive, yet often taken to represent "American" culture and character. Contributors first engage with how southern thinkers of all sorts have struggled with belonging--who is an insider and who is an outsider. Second, they consider how thought in the South has over time created ideas about the South. The volume capitalizes on an interdisciplinary synergy that has come to characterize southern studies, exploring current creative tensions between classic themes in southern history and the new ways to approach them. Region and identity, intellectuals and change, the South as an idea and ideas in the South—these continue to inspire the best new research as showcased in this collection. Contributors are Michael T. Bernath, Stephen Berry, John Grammer, Michael Kreyling, Scott Romine, Beth Barton Schweiger, Mitchell Snay, Melanie Benson Taylor, Jonathan Daniel Wells, and Timothy J. Williams.
The untold story of how one sensational trial propelled a self-taught lawyer and a future president into the national spotlight. In May of 1856, the steamboat Effie Afton barreled into a pillar of the Rock Island Bridge, unalterably changing the course of American transportation history. Within a year, long-simmering tensions between powerful steamboat interests and burgeoning railroads exploded, and the nation’s attention, absorbed by the Dred Scott case, was riveted by a new civil trial. Dramatically reenacting the Effie Afton case—from its unlikely inception, complete with a young Abraham Lincoln’s soaring oratory, to the controversial finale—this “masterful” (Christian Science Monitor) account gives us the previously untold story of how one sensational trial propelled a self-taught lawyer and a future president into the national spotlight.