"The major strength of Rouleau's work is that he does not limit his scope to either the Pacific or Atlantic. Instead he sets out to examine a global maritime empire."—Antony Adler, H-War (June 2015)
"Brian Rouleau's new book forces usto reconsider the ways in which foreign relations work. Ordinary people, it turnsout, have had an enormous impact on international affairs. Rouleau's provocative book explains how common maritime laborers shapedthe contours of America's entanglements with foreign peoples during the nineteenthcentury.Rouleau has a true talent for seeing the larger dimensions of everyday interactions."—Christopher P. Magra, Diplomatic History
"With Sails Whitening Every Sea challenges a popular view concerning the romance of American maritime history. It examines this image through the lens of sociology and effectively casts nostalgia and sentimentality upon the rocks of ruthless racist reality. . . . [T]his is a valuable book worthy of being added to any maritime historian's library."—Louis Arthur Norton, The Northern Mariner(July 2015)
"Rouleau points out – provocatively and persuasively – that much of what antebellum Americansknew of the world was filtered 'through maritime mediation' (p. 34). Seafarers’ letters, memoirsand reports from abroad were not just the stuff of later romanticized remembrances of the ‘days ofsail’, rather, they were essential sources of commercial and ethnographic information as theAmerican imagination chased American commerce around the globe. . . . With Sails Whitening Every Sea handles well thetremendous complexity of the subject matter. All of the categories discussed – gender, race, class– were moving targets, all the more so at sea, and historians are richer for Rouleau’s careful and sophisticated examination of his subject."—Matthew Taylor Raffety, International Journal of Maritime History (November 2015)
"With Sails Whitening Every Sea is an excellent scholarly monograph. . . . Clearly organized andwell written, the book will appeal primarily to a specialized and scholarly audience because of the author's tendency to use imposing words and terms. In summary,this is a first rate study which adds to our understandingof the way in which American sailors and whalershelped shape Americans’ views of the world and American international relations."—John H. Schroeder, American Historical Review (February 2016)
"Brian Rouleau's book is an important addition to the growing field of literature and scholarship that seeks to more completely assess the role of American mariners in the Early Republic."—Timothy G. Lynch, Sea History (Winter 2015-16)
"Rouleau hascrafted an impressive reimagining of working-class seafarers that places them at the heart ofthe American encounter with the world in theearly and mid-nineteenth century. . . .Rouleau's straightforward arguments,imaginative research, wit, and strength as awriter made this work an uncommonly pleasant read."—Joshua M. Smith, Journal of American History (March 2016)
"American sailors roamed the globe by the hundreds of thousands in the decades before the Civil War, yet they've been all but excluded from our histories of early U.S. foreign relations. Brian Rouleau’s smart, probing, and tough-minded book will permanently change that."—Brian DeLay, University of California, Berkeley
"In this groundbreaking study of U.S. sailors abroad, Brian Rouleau rewrites the history of U.S. foreign relations during the antebellum era. Through keen analysis, impressive research, and compelling storytelling, Rouleau reveals that Manifest Destiny was a global process that extended far beyond U.S. terrestrial borders and into the vast reaches of the Atlantic and Pacific. He shows that long before the late nineteenth-century push for global empire, antebellum sailors were critical nonstate actors who—as writers, laborers, minstrel show performers, traders, and violent defenders of white American masculinity—shaped the course of U.S. diplomacy and remade the meaning of race and gender worldwide."—Stacey L. Smith, Oregon State University, author of Frontiers of Freedom: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction
"With Sails Whitening Every Sea effectively illustrates a wide range of intercultural encounters between sailors and the people they met around the globe. Brian Rouleau's work makes a contribution to the field of diplomatic history by recovering the critical role American sailors, the era’s largest and most important body of cross-cultural actors, played in foreign relations in the nineteenth century. As Rouleau writes, 'The world knew the United States, and United States knew the world, through its sailors.’"—Kariann Yokota, University of Colorado, Denver, author of Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation
