Neil P. Chatelain, Defending the Arteries of Rebellion. Confederate Naval Operations in the Mississippi River Valley, 1861-1865 by Jim Hughey

Abstract

Book Reviews 91 action against perceived acts of forgetting. Ultimately, it started a voyage of reclaiming its identity and underwent a fundamental revision.Much of the remainder of the book focuses on the disintegration and transformation of both the place and the industry that had inhabited the landscape: a narrative channeled through the experience of a single trawler port, compiled from individual and collective memory, framed by documentary research, and expressed through the understanding of an historian. Byrne's vision of its past and its evolution as part museum-part working seaport represents Hull's new beginning.Beyond Trawlertown is a thought-provoking book in which Jo Byrne provides his readers with an abundance of 860 scholarly footnotes within a relatively slim volume. As a native of Gloucester, Massachusetts, this reviewer personally related to the story, but this theme has similarly played out in other fishing towns in North America such as St. John's, Lunenburg, New Bedford, and Monterey. This is a unique, well-written contribution to maritime literature and highly recommended to anyone interested in this important, still evolving topic.