Over the years, thousands of tales, both true and fantastic, have been told about the dastardly thievery of pirates, and their rum-drunk exploits and high-seas violence never fail to delight. Compiled here are more than 100 of the very best pirate yarns ever created on history's most debaucherous scalawags. The stories, songs, and verses include writing by Daniel Defoe, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Louis Stevenson, and...

This is the little-known story of how a newly independent nation was challenged by four Muslim powers and what happened when America's third president decided to stand up to intimidation. When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, America faced a crisis. The new nation was deeply in debt and needed its economy to grow quickly, but its merchant ships were under attack. Pirates from North Africa's Barbary coast routinely captured American sailors...

An entrancing tale of piracy colored with gold, treachery and double-dealing (Portland Press Herald), Pulitzer Prize-finalist Colin Woodward's The Republic of Pirates is the historical biography of the exploits of infamous Caribbean buccaneers.
In the early eighteenth century, the Pirate Republic was home to some of the great pirate captains, including Edward "Blackbeard" Teach, "Black Sam" Bellamy, and Charles Vane. Along with their fellow pirates...

In the twenty-first century piracy has regained a central place in Western culture, thanks to a surprising combination of Johnny Depp and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise as well as the dramatic rise of modern-day piracy around Somalia and the Horn of Africa. In this global history of the phenomenon, maritime terrorism and piracy expert Peter Lehr casts fresh light on pirates. Ranging from the Vikings and Wako pirates in the Middle Ages to modern...

"In January 2012, having covered a Somali pirate trial in Hamburg for Spiegel Online International-and funded by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting-Michael Scott Moore traveled to the Horn of Africa to write about piracy and ways to end it. In a terrible twist of fate, Moore himself was kidnapped and subsequently held captive by Somali pirates. Subjected to conditions that break even the strongest spirits-physical injury, starvation,...

"Pittsburgh Pirates manager Clint Hurdle was old school and stubborn. But after twenty straight losing seasons and his job on the line, he was ready to try anything. So when he met with GM Neal Huntington in October 2012, they decided to discard everything they knew about the game and instead take on drastic "big data" strategies. Going well beyond the number-crunching of Moneyball, which used statistics found on the back of baseball cards to identify...

Documents the story of underworld legend Albert Hicks, chronicling his mid-nineteenth-century crime spree and the plot gone wrong that culminated in an onboard massacre and manhunt in 1860 Coney Island. "The story of Albert Hicks, the most notorious criminal on the New York waterfront, unfolded in the course of three bloody months in the summer before the Civil War. There was a massacre, a flight, a manhunt, and a trial, all of which kept the nation...