As a historian of piracy, I suppose it was inevitable that my research summaries would end up reading like bad monologues for a late night comedy act. Like this tidbit from the Archivo General de Indias in Sevilla: “1618 four Frenchmen appeared before the governor of Santo Domingo accused of piracy by the Spanish patrolmen who caught them on the island’s coast. The governor interrogates the four men through a translator. One of the men admits that, to survive, they occasionally went pirating on the high seas, but that they never stole anything from the Spanish. The governor then asks him where they got their ship, to which the men admit that they may have stolen one thing from the Spanish.” Ba dum tsshhh, cue the rimshot and laughter from my friends as I relate the story over beers later that evening. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Pirates
A Tale of Two Bounties: The Christian Brothers, Mutinies, and Potential Piracies
A few years ago, I was delivering my first lecture to a hall full of well over one hundred students. Thinking I would impress them with my popular culture knowledge, I included a reference to Captain Jack Sparrow as an example of the type of piracy I did not research, and one of the many forms of piracy in which they should not participate. Crickets ensued. Thankfully, my follow-up joke about the crickets landed better, but this left me all the more surprised when a student exiting the lecture swung by the front desk and made a quick reference to Marlon Brandon being a better sailor than Johnny Depp. Embarrassed though I am to admit, it was a reference I did not understand until about a month ago. Continue reading
Autumn Reads
“Valley of the Catawissa in Autumn,” Thomas Moran (ca. 1862)
Fall brings new early American titles to explore. Enjoy our Spring Reads 2015 list, too, and share your finds below!
Guest Post: “X” Marks the History: Plundering the Past in Assassin’s Creed IV
Robert Whitaker is a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation, “Policing Globalization: The Imperial Origins of International Police Cooperation, 1918-1960” studies the relationship between the British Empire and international police organizations, such as Interpol. He serves as an Assistant General Editor for the journal Britain and the World, and is the creator of the YouTube series History Respawned. Bryan S. Glass teaches the history of Britain’s interactions with the World at Texas State University. He is the founding member and General Editor of The British Scholar Society and serves as an Editor of the Britain and the World book series (Palgrave Macmillan). His publications include an article in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, The Scottish Nation at Empire’s End (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming), and a co-edited volume with John MacKenzie entitled Scotland, Empire and Decolonisation in the Twentieth Century (Manchester University Press, forthcoming).
French game company Ubisoft has turned early American history into an age of booty. Over the past two years, the company has used early American history as the backdrop for three successive and successful titles in their Assassin’s Creed franchise: Assassin’s Creed III, Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. The most recent of these titles, Black Flag, is set in the Golden Age of Piracy during the early eighteenth century, and is easily the most profitable and well received of the three. Critics and players have praised Black Flag for its gameplay, graphics, and music—or rather, sea shanties.[1] But the biggest reason why this game has garnered accolades and high sales is because of its use, or misuse, of history. More than any other Assassin’s Creed game, Black Flag plays fast and loose with the historical record. It skews away from accuracy in favor of fun at almost every turn. Yet even as Black Flag thumbs its nose at the concerns of academic history, it nevertheless succeeds, perhaps better than any previous title in the series, in giving players a sensibility of the age. Continue reading
The Junto 