Most recently, in his new general history, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present, the Israeli scholar Michael Oren opens with a long chapter on the Barbary conflict.

Whipple (1991, republished 2001) and Victory in Tripoli: How America’s War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Added to my own shelf in the recent past have been The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World, by Frank Lambert (2005) Jefferson’s War: America’s First War on Terror 1801–1805, by Joseph Wheelan (2003) To the Shores of Tripoli: The Birth of the U.S. When I asked a professional military historian-a man with direct access to Defense Department archives-if there was any book that he could recommend, he came back with a slight shrug.īut now the curious reader may choose from a freshet of writing on the subject. Henry Adams, in his discussion of our third president, had some boyhood reminiscences of the widespread hero-worship of naval officer Stephen Decatur, and other fragments and shards showed up in other quarries, but a sound general history of the subject was hard to come by. When I first began to plan my short biography of Thomas Jefferson, I found it difficult to research the chapter concerning the so-called Barbary Wars: an event or series of events that had seemingly receded over the lost horizon of American history.

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