The story of an idealistic Merchant Marine officer who disgraces himself when he abandons his ship.

Explores the challenges and rewards of attending the United States Merchant Marine Academy in King's Point, New York, where individuals are trained to become Merchant Marine officers.

"Unshackling America challenges the persistent fallacy that Americans fought two separate wars of independence. Williard Sterne Randall documents an unremitting fifty-year-long struggle for economic independence from Britain overlapping two armed conflicts linked by an unacknowledged global struggle. Throughout this perilous period, the struggle was all about free trade. Neither Jefferson nor any other Founding Father could divine that the Revolutionary...

"From Native Americans with birch bark canoes and inventive colonists who took fishing shallops and laid decks over them for coastal trading to the rise of the automated mass carrier and ever-bigger passenger cruise ships, this book tells the story of four hundred years of America's maritime history. It is filled with powerful and evocative images of ships such as the Mayflower, Savannah, Flying Cloud, Alabama, Sea-Land McLean, and Exxon Valdez; ports,...