To My Dearest Wife, Lide: Letters from George B. Gideon Jr. During Commodore Perry's Expedition to Japan, 1853-1855

摘要

The 1850s were a particularly exciting period in global maritime history. Expansion in all directions was the watchword, and by mid-decade, the United States enjoyed a prodigious shipbuilding industry to support oceanic trade. While the following decade was dominated by the Civil War, the 1850s played an important role in the rise of American sea power and foreign policy. The Treaty of Kanagawa, signed between the Tokugawa shogunate and the United States in March of 1854, is perhaps the single most illustrative point in early American gunboat diplomacy.