Jack Tar's Story

Myra C. Glenn is Professor of American History at Elmira College. She is the author of Campaigns against Corporal Punishment: Prisoners, Sailors, Women, and Children in Antebellum America and Thomas K. Beecher: Minister to a Changing America, 1824–1900. Her work has appeared in numerous professional journals, and she is the recipient of two Fulbright lecture awards.

• Introduction: why study antebellum sailor narratives?; 1. Stories of escape, freedom, and captivity: seaman authors recall their early years; 2. Manhood, nationalism, and sailor narratives of British captivity and the War of 1812; 3. Exploring the meaning of revolution in the Americas: sailor narratives of the Haitian and South American Wars of Independence; 4. Defending one's rights as a man and an American citizen: sailor narratives as exposés of flogging; 5. Straddling conflicting notions of manhood: sailor narratives as stories of roistering and religious conversion; Afterword.

“If historians are detectives, Myra Glenn is a super-sleuth who pursues her facts with the seriousness of Joe Friday of Dragnet. She is interested in more than ‘just the facts,’ however, and uses her research to illuminate both manhood and memory as they relate to the common seaman. The result is a book which goes beyond Jack Tar and even the nineteenth-century American past, and informs all of us about both the process and practice of history.” —Paul A. Gilje, University of Oklahoma