Few eras hold greater fascination for us than the Age of Fighting Sail, the forty-year period from 1775 to 1815. And few writers are as well qualified to bring this adventure-packed period to life as the critically acclaimed naval historian and biographer Nathan Miller. Now, in the first modern chronicle of the epic of wooden ships and pigtailed sailors, Miller provides essential reading for devotees of the popular nautical novels of Patrick O'Brian, C.S. Forester, Alexander Kent, and others. Broadsides covers the naval side of the American Revolution, the twenty-two year struggle between Britain's hard-pressed Royal Navy and France that began in 1793, the foundation of the U.S. Navy and America's forgotten undeclared naval war with France along with their struggle aginst the Barbary pirates, and closes with the war of 1812. - Jacket flap.