| Portion of title |
Life in a home for elderly and disabled naval sailors and Marines and the perilous seafaring careers that brought them there |
| Contents |
Introduction: the old men and me: a search for enlisted history -- A note on terminology -- Refuge on the Schuylkill -- Life's ebb tide -- A rocky start -- The ship comes ashore -- A curious character -- Deserving old men, once young -- The few, the fortunate -- Shipmates -- What shall we do with the drunken sailor? -- A house of refuge for exotic malefactors -- Hard lives, tolls collected -- Minds decayed, minds disordered -- Leaving asylum -- Voyage's end -- Safe harbor-finally found -- Epilogue: Seeking the old men today -- Appendix: Sailors of color in the pre-Civil War U.S. Navy -- The Naval Asylum and its beneficiaries: a survey of sources. |
| Abstract |
"Ungentle Goodnights uses the records of the United States Naval Asylum (later the United States Naval Home), a residence for disabled and elderly sailors and Marines established by the U.S. government, to recover the lives of the 541 men who were admitted there as lifetime residents between 1831 and 1866. The records of the Naval Asylum are an especially rich source for discovering these lower-deck lives because would-be residents were required to submit summaries of their naval careers as part of the admission process. Using these and related records, published and manuscript, it is possible to reconstruct the veterans' lives from their teenage years (and sometimes earlier) until their deaths."--Provided by publisher. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Issued in other form | Online version: McKee, Christopher, 1935- Ungentle goodnights. Annapolis, MD : Naval Institute Press, [2018] 9781682473672 |
| Genre/form | Biography. |
| Genre/form | History. |
| LCCN | 2018025727 |
| ISBN | 9781591145738 (hardcover ; alk. paper) |
| ISBN | 1591145732 |
| ISBN | (ebook) |
