Raising the Flag
America's First Envoys in Faraway Lands
-
- 89,99 lei
-
- 89,99 lei
Publisher Description
Since its inception the United States has sent envoys to advance American interests abroad, both across oceans and to areas that later became part of the country. Little has been known about these first envoys until now. From China to Chile, Tripoli to Tahiti, Mexico to Muscat, Peter D. Eicher chronicles the experience of the first American envoys in foreign lands. Their stories, often stranger than fiction, are replete with intrigues, revolutions, riots, war, shipwrecks, swashbucklers, desperadoes, and bootleggers. The circumstances the diplomats faced were precursors to today’s headlines: Americans at war in the Middle East, intervention in Latin America, pirates off Africa, trade deficits with China.
Early envoys abroad faced hostile governments, physical privations, disease, isolation, and the daunting challenge of explaining American democracy to foreign rulers. Many suffered threats from tyrannical despots, some were held as slaves or hostages, and others led foreign armies into battle. Some were heroes, some were scoundrels, and many perished far from home. From the American Revolution to the Civil War, Eicher profiles the characters who influenced the formative period of American diplomacy and the first steps the United States took as a world power. Their experiences combine to chart key trends in the development of early U.S. foreign policy that continue to affect us today. Raising the Flag illuminates how American ideas, values, and power helped shape the modern world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Retired diplomat Eicher unearths tales of some of the fledgling United States' first envoys to foreign lands "foreign" at the time including Louisiana and California, as well as the Ottoman Empire, China, and Africa's Barbary Coast. With an official government foreign service years off, the men sent abroad to represent the U.S. in the two generations after the Revolutionary War were a motley mix of traders, sailors, and even a poet. The first U.S. representative to Tahiti, Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout, wasn't even American. Their experiences in the countries where they served were likewise mixed. James Cathcart, later the first U.S. consul in Tripoli, began his career in North Africa as a slave laborer in Algiers. Reports by Thomas Larkin, the first and only U.S. consul to California, played a key role in feeding the gold rush frenzy in 1848. Japanese lore has made Townshend Harris more famous for his role as the villain in stories of the geisha Okichi-san than for his contribution to opening relations between the U.S. and Japan. Eicher makes a strong case for the importance of these largely underappreciated early diplomats. Though the writing can lean toward the academic, this book brings to light little-known stories that will fascinate early-America enthusiasts.
