“Riddell shows US sailors struggling for their own emancipation. Especially after 1898, he shows them also as fashioning themselves as white agents of empire. The potential for drama and tragedy is great, and fully realized, in this riveting book.”--David Roediger, author of The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right
"The echoes of the past reverberate today, and in few places more vividly than in the pages of Riddell's On the Waves of Empire." --A Sea of Words