Lecture Date: February 24, 2022
The Community Bank of the Chesapeake Lecture
Set against the backdrop of the Age of Exploration, Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America's Most Notorious Pirates reveals the dramatic and surprising history of American piracy’s “Golden Age”—spanning the late 1600s through the early 1700s—when lawless pirates plied the coastal waters of North America and beyond. In his slide show and presentation, Eric Jay Dolin will illustrate how American colonists at first supported these outrageous pirates in an early display of colonial solidarity against the Crown, and then violently opposed them. Through engrossing episodes of roguish glamour and extreme brutality, Dolin depicts the star pirates of this period, including towering Blackbeard, as well as pirates whose stories are less familiar, but whose despicable deeds are often just as riveting. Upending popular misconceptions and cartoonish stereotypes, Dolin provides this wholly original account of the seafaring outlaws whose raids reflect the precarious nature of American colonial life.
Speaker: Eric Jay Dolin
Eric Jay Dolin is the author of fifteen books, including Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, which was chosen as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe, and also won the 2007 John Lyman Award for U.S. Maritime History. His most recent book is A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America's Hurricanes, which was chosen as one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, Booklist, Library Journal, and the editors at Amazon, and was also a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. Prior to A Furious Sky, he published Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America's Most Notorious Pirates, which was chosen as a "Must Read" book for 2019 by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and was a finalist for the 2019 Julia Ward Howe Award given by the Boston's Author's Club. A graduate of Brown, Yale, and MIT, where he received his PhD in environmental policy, Dolin lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with his family.