The United States established an academy for educating future army officers at West Point in 1802. Why, then, did it take this maritime nation forty-three more years to create a similar school for the navy? The Long Road to Annapolis examines the origins of the United States Naval Academy and the national debate that led to its founding. Americans early on looked with suspicion upon professional military officers, fearing that a standing military establishment would become too powerful, entrenched, or dangerous to republican ideals. Tracing debates about the nature of the nation, class identity, and partisan politics, William P. Leeman explains how the country's reluctance to establish a national naval academy gradually evolved into support for the idea. The United States Naval Academy was finally established in 1845, when most Americans felt it would provide the best educational environment for producing officers and gentlemen who could defend the United States at sea, serve American interests abroad, and contribute to the nation's mission of economic, scientific, and moral progress. Considering the development of the naval officer corps in relation to American notions of democracy and aristocracy, The Long Road to Annapolis sheds new light on the often competing ways Americans perceived their navy and their nation during the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Long Road to Annapolis examines the origins of the United States Naval Academy and the national debate that led to its founding. --from publisher description

This book is primarily based on a collection of letters written by four young farmboy soldiers during the Civil War. The purpose of the book, through the letters, is to give some insights into the soldiers' personal thoughts, worries, moods, sufferings, and problems. Illustrated.

Breaking from traditional historical interpretations of the period, Eric Nellis takes a long view of the origins and consequences of the Revolution and asserts that the Revolution was not, as others have argued, generated by a well-developed desire for independence, but rather by a series of shifts in British imperial policies after 1750. Nellis argues that the Revolution was still being shaped as late as 1820 and that many racial, territorial, economic, and constitutional issues were submerged in the growth of the republic and the enthusiasm of the population. In addressing the nature of the Revolution, Nellis suggests that the American Revolution and American political systems and principles are unique and much less suited for export than many Americans believe.

In America today, a public official's lawful income consists of a salary. But until a century ago, the law frequently authorized officials to make money on a profit-seeking basis. Prosecutors won a fee for each defendant convicted. Tax collectors received a cut of each evasion uncovered. Naval officers took a reward for each ship sunk. The list goes on. This book is the first to document American government's "for-profit" past, to discover how profit-seeking defined officials' relationship to the citizenry, and to explain how lawmakers-by banishing the profit motive in favor of the salary-transformed that relationship forever.

"A detailed account of how the US Navy modernized itself between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, through strategic approaches to its personnel, operations, technologies, and policies, among them an emerging officer corps, which sought to professionalize its own ranks, modernize the platforms on which it sailed, and define its own role within national affairs and in the broader global maritime commons"--

Although Theodore Roosevelt has been the subject of numerous books, there has not been a single volume that traces Roosevelt's interaction with the U.S. Navy from his work as a naval historian in the 1880s through his leadership of the Navy as president in the early twentieth century. The editors of this volume fill in this gap in the historical literature. Each essay in this collection by leading historians of American naval history will cover one aspect of Roosevelt's relationship with the Navy while addressing the unifying theme of his use of history and America's naval heritage to advocate for strengthening and modernizing the Navy during his own lifetime. In addition to the book editors, contributors are: Sarah Goldberger, James R. Holmes, David Kohnen, Branden Little, Jon Scott Logel, Edward J. Marolda, Kevin D. McCranie, Matthew Oyos, Jason W. Smith, and Craig L. Symonds.