The Mammoth Book of Life Before the Mast: Sailors' Eyewitness Stories from the Age of Fighting Ships

Primary sources, that is materials written by people who actually participated in a historical event, are the meat of historical work, and often the hardest things to find. While secondary sources (materials written by people who were not personally present at an event, but may have read about it or spoken with people who were) can help us gain a basic understanding of an event, we cannot really begin to understand it until we have studied the accounts of those who were there.Unfortunately, primary source materials are often the most difficult to find. Professional historians often spend thousands of dollars in travel expenses to visit archives and study fragile documents. However, students of history cannot afford that sort of travel expense, nor can the documents themselves survive such a level of daily use.That is why anthologies such as these are received with such joy by history instructors serious about teaching their students how to learn from history, rather than simply how to pass tests. In this book one will find a large number of important texts written by people who lived through the events they are describing. Some are senior admirals and other important figures, but many are ordinary enlisted men who provide a perspective that often gets forgotten in the official histories one finds in textbooks.Think of it as your own private mini-archive on the Age of Sail.