Hamilton Hall Americana Lecture: Eric Jay Dolin's "Rebels at Sea"

Hamilton Hall is pleased to welcome local author Eric Jay Dolin as its Fall 2024 Americana Lecturer.

Eric Jay Dolin is the author of sixteen books, including Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, which was chosen as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe, and also won the 2007 John Lyman Award for U.S. Maritime History. His 2022 Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution, which was awarded the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award and the Samuel Eliot Morison Book Award for Naval Literature. Rebels was also selected as a “Must-Read” book by the Massachusetts Center for the Book.

In Rebels at Sea, Dolin contends that privateers, though often seen as profiteers at best and pirates at worst, were in fact critical to the Revolution’s outcome. Armed with cannons, swivel guns, muskets, and pikes?as well as government documents granting them the right to seize enemy ships?thousands of privateers tormented the British on the broad Atlantic and in bays and harbors on both sides of the ocean. Abounding with tales of daring maneuvers and deadly encounters, Rebels at Sea presents the American Revolution as we have rarely seen it before.

A reception and book signing (with books from Wicked Good Books) will follow the lecture.