With a foreword by President Barack Obama, the twelfth volume in the Naval History and Heritage Command’s Naval Documents of the American Revolution series tells the story of the Revolutionary War on the water during the period of April to June 1778. In the tradition of the preceding volumes—the first of which was published in 1964—this work synthesizes edited documents, including correspondence, ship logs, muster rolls, orders, and newspaper accounts, that provide a comprehensive understanding of the war at sea in the spring of 1778. The editors organize this wide array of texts chronologically by theater and incorporate French, Italian, and Spanish transcriptions with English translations throughout. Volume 12 presents the essential primary sources on a crucial time in the young republic’s naval history—as the British consolidate their strength in the Mid-Atlantic, and the Americans threaten British shipping in European waters and gain a powerful ally as France prepares to enter the war.

Marines In The Revolution by Charles Richard Smith; Charles H Waterhouse "Traces the activities of one special group of Marines; the successes and failures of the group as a whole, and the fundamental aspects of modern Marine amphibious doctrine which grew out of Continental Marine experience during the eight-year fight for American independence."

"Yankee Sailors in British Gaols offers the first comprehensive account of American servicemen detained within the confines of Mill and Forton prisons, the principal land-based detention centers in Britain during the American Revolution. Forton and Mill during the course of the War of Independence held approximately 3,000 American prisoners, almost all of them naval personnel. In a few cases, these American prisoners were incarcerated for more than four years, a longer recorded period of incarceration in overseas prisons than in any United States war prior to Vietnam. Professor Cohen's examination of wide-ranging and widely scattered primary and secondary sources provides an extraordinarily detailed picture of life within the closed society of each prison, as well as insight into the various ways in which Britons and Americans outside the prisons provided legal and extralegal help to the rebel detainees."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"A privateer, strickly speaking, was a private armed vessel carrying no cargo and devoted exclusively to warlike use."--Intro., p. 14.