Prizefighter

Patrick Griffin is the Madden-Hennebry Family Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, Bye-Fellow of St Edmund's College, University of Cambridge, and the author of six previous books, most recently The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The Fall and Rise of a Connected World.

"A tour de force of narrative history. By tracing the peripatetic life of one remarkable Irishman—from Cork to London, and from Sydney to New York City, Liverpool, Honolulu, and San Francisco—Patrick Griffin tells the story not just of the notorious prizefighter ‘Yankee’ Sullivan but also of the world Sullivan created during a tumultuous forty-year period in the nineteenth century. In vivid, supple prose, Griffin draws the reader into the excitement at every twist and turn of a story ingeniously plotted as sixteen rounds in the ring." - Kevin Kenny, New York University, author of The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States"An exactingly researched and entertainingly told tale of a notorious character who did more than his share to forge the modern world. Griffin shows us how much the seemingly insular world of boxing, a broken-beaked canary in a coal mine, can tell us about ourselves and our history." - Carlo Rotella, author of Cut Time and Good With Their Hands