what happened after the Revolutionary War was won and before the US of A lived happily ever after as an eternal beacon of Liberty, Justice and all that…?
Pirates. Really. In his recent book, The Barbary Wars, Frank Lambert tells the story — in respectable historical detail — of the fledgling, pre-Consitutional United States facing off against the so-called Barbary Pirates, or Muslim North Africa’s mercenary naval forces. And this is not a story of a powerful America rising above the negative forces of tyranny. Rather, it’s one of an insignificant (politically and militarily speaking) United States struggling to bring to life the still infantile concept of “free-trade” in a world-economy dominated by mercantile-minded naval powers (like Britain, France and Spain.) If you were under the impression that Pirates roamed the high seas in search of shiny loot buried under X-marked sand dunes or, alternately, that the US rose to quick economic and political prominence soon after the Brits were booted, this meticulously written historical account of an oft-overlooked regional scuffle should be on your to-read list. Likewise, if you thought the
