the age of increasing public amusements, world fairs, and expositions. This helps explain the subsequent maritime craze in art and literature. Shipwrecks embodied the tension between modernization and real-life dangers, a sublime struggle between technology and nature. And the “camera fiends” and “disaster tourists,” followed by more vendors and entrepreneurs, could now access the beach and see doomed vessels for themselves. Wells summarizes the late nineteenth-century American beach as ringed in a dense web of institutions that guide navigation, identify vessels, report disasters, and rescue life and property. Shipwrecked provides a service to the field of heritage preservation, demonstrating that cultural landscape analysis of the coast does indeed reveal deeper levels of significance and social connections to history formerly beyond the reach of the singular wreck tale, and it does so in ways particular to the American beach. Shipwrecks played a broad role in driving specific changes that shaped our behavior and conception of the shore. Joining the cognitive landscape with the historical narrative from a wreck-laden American century is no small effort, yet Wells does so with an accurate brevity and deft hand. Hans K. Van Tilburg, PhD Honolulu, Hawaii
Inside the US Navy of 1812–1815 by William S. Dudley (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2021, 348pp, maps, illus, notes, index, isbn 978-1-42144051-4; $54.95hc)
Naval historian William S. Dudley has focused his career on the early history of the American Navy. His latest book, Inside the US Navy of 1812–1815, is the product of ten years of effort, resulting in an essential volume. Dudley writes that “the purpose of this study is to demonstrate the importance of logistics for the US Navy in the War of 1812,” logistics being “all the elements of naval warfare except the fight-
Lighthouses of the georgia Coast by
William Rawlings
Georgia’s barrier islands are today the site of five existing lighthouses—Tybee, Cockspur, Sapelo, St. Simons, and Little Cumberland— each with its own unique style, history, and role in events over the past decades and centuries. Richly illustrated, this book also explores the basics of lighthouse design and construction; the role, lore, and legacy of lighthouse keepers; the significance of lighthouses as strategic structures during the turbulent days of the Civil War; and more.
www.mupress.org 58
ing….” This approach treats combat as the end point of a logistical process involving everything from the acquisition of construction materials to the provision of competent leadership. The design has produced voluminous useful detail and analysis of that process for the specialist, while delivering a comprehensive and engaging work for the lay reader. One of the many pleasures of the book is the author’s relationship with the men who lived two centuries ago. In his hands, they seem human and immediate. He is rarely judgmental, often offering a range of possible reasons behind decisions gone wrong. This is a volume centered in substantial part on bureaucracy, money, and materiel, but it is populated with compelling characters and inspiring heroes. This American story is a rich one, and the writing absolutely engaging throughout. The United States declared war on Britain on 18 June 1812, and just two months later USS Constitution defeated the British frigate Guerriere in a one-on-one fight off Nova Scotia. In October, USS United States defeated and sank the new British frigate Macedonian, and in early December the Constitution defeated the British frigate Java, again in single combat. Finally, the British Admiralty instructed its frigate captains to avoid fighting an American peer without support. American naval strategy at the beginning of the nineteenth century called for a force able to defend the nation against an aggressor twice as large. With prospective enemies France and Great Britain having been engaged in an all-consuming struggle since 1793, the US Navy, led by its heavily built and gunned frigates, looked capable of that task. The powerful American frigates overmatched the smaller British cousins and were faster and more maneuverable than any ship of the line. Nevertheless, with the abdication of Napoleon and his banishment to Elba in April 1814, Britain was able to bring overwhelming naval power to bear against the US Navy and the nation’s privateers, effectively blockading the entire Atlantic coastline. On a strategic level, the British Army’s burning of Washington and its campaign along the Chesapeake seemed to lack a focused objective—more a slap in the face SEA HISTORY 176, AUTUMN 2021