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p r e f a c e This book is divided into three parts, each of which contains three analytical narratives—chapters, organized around analytical themes, that narrate an aspect of the story of the influence of North Africa upon America. The first part offers a study of how the early national public sphere functioned to spread the news of the Algerian crisis and of how events in North Africa may, in turn, have shaped the American public sphere. In recent years scholars have evinced great interest in the Revolutionary and early national public sphere, yet we still do not understand exactly how it worked.1 Specifically, what sort of media “content” engaged the public? How did this content get to the public? How did mass media influence the public, and how did the public influence the media? These are big questions that cannot be easily answered, but part 1 attempts to offer some preliminary answers based on the Algerian crisis. Chapter 1 discusses the nuts and bolts of how Algerian news arrived in the United States via a sort of late-eighteenthcentury worldwide web of information. Chapter 2 investigates the role of the captives themselves, who spent a surprising amount of time writing to friends, relations, and officials in the United States in a valiant effort to gain their freedom . Although their effort failed in the short term, it was remarkably successful in creating public interest in their plight, and the extent of their success suggests the influence that non-elites could have upon the early public sphere. In chapter 3, the story moves back and forth across the Atlantic as the captives and their diplomatic ally, David Humphreys, attempt to publicize their fate while the public at large and governmental officials react to these efforts, sometimes making their own attempts to relieve the captives’ suffering. Part 2 assesses the effects of Algerian captivity on Americans at home. The Algerian captives were often described, by themselves and others, as “slaves,” and their fate played a fascinating part in efforts to remove the issue of race from the burgeoning debate over slavery in the 1790s and beyond. Chapter 4 focuses on the words of the captives, literary authors, and abolitionist societies who brought Algerian “slavery” into the larger debate over abolition. Algerian captivity also played an important role in national self-definition during a crucial time in the new republic’s young history, when it was undergoing the process of creating an “imagined community.”2 During this period, the new nation’s political system was taking form, and Algerian captivity influenced this process, too—first in making a new, more energetic Constitution seem more desirable and then in the process of party formation in the 1790s. Chapter 5 assesses the generally negative influence of Algerian captivity on national identity. Finally, the encounter with Algiers , depressing as it was, suggested to many Americans the need to make their country stronger. Chapter 6 examines the connection between Algerian captivity, the development of the navy, and, eventually, America’s enlarged role abroad. By extending the story to the capture of the USS Philadelphia and its crew during the Tripolitan Crisis of 1803–1805 and to the second Algerian crisis of 1812–1815, part 3 explores how Barbary captivity affected Americans’ conception of their nation as a world power as they pushed the new republic away from postcolonial dependence to the brink of empire. Chapter 7 examines the importance of American conceptions of masculinity and honor in driving the new nation toward a more muscular response to the Philadelphia crisis. It focuses on the diplomats and naval officers who were involved in formulating American policy and action in Tripoli, including Captain Richard O’Brien and James Cathcart, who earlier suffered nearly twelve years of captivity in Algiers, and also discusses partisan political debate at home. Chapter 8 analyzes the development of American orientalism during the Barbary crisis, how it was influenced by changing attitudes toward Indian “savages” at home, and how it began, by the early nineteenth century, to suggest a possible American empire of trade. Finally, chapter 9 examines the second Algerian crisis, the other War of 1812. The plight of the captured American ship Edwin and its crew resonated with Americans, who saw themselves fighting for independence against a British empire that impressed American sailors at sea and, they alleged, persuaded Native Americans to capture American citizens on land. With the end of the War of 1812, the Madison administration , under fire...

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