Joseph Gibbs – författare

Hailing from the Keystone State’s rugged western counties, the Eleventh Pennsylvania Reserves was one of the Civil War’s most heavily engaged units. Of more than 2,100 regiments raised by the North, it suffered the eighth highest percentage of battle deaths, earning it the gruesome sobriquet "Bloody Eleventh." Three Years in the "Bloody Eleventh" tells the story of this often-overlooked element of the Army of the Potomac from before the war up through 1864. Drawing on letters, diaries, and archival documents, Joseph Gibbs writes of men such as Colonel Thomas Gallagher, who led his troops into battle smoking a cigar, and Samuel Jackson, who became the regiment’s commander following Gallagher’s promotion. He rediscovers the complexities of the men who commanded the brigades and divisions of which the Eleventh Reserves was a part—figures such as George Meade, John Reynolds, and Samuel Crawford. While Gibbs writes about the officers, he never loses sight of the men in the ranks who marched into places such as Gaines’ Mill, Miller’s Cornfield at Antietam, and the Wheatfield at Gettysburg. Nor does he forget the homes, wives, and children they left behind in western Pennsylvania. With its meticulous research and lucid prose, Three Years in the "Bloody Eleventh" provides both scholars and Civil War enthusiasts with an unprecedented look inside the trials and tribulations of one of the war’s most battle-tested units.

..one of the best coming of age novels I have ever read. It is sensitive, funny, insightful and moving. Both Frank and Brogan will live on in your readers'' imagination. And the ending is pitch perfect- Doris Kearns Goodwin (Pulitzer Prize winning historian)

Every family has their hidden crackpot...

For 17-year-old Brogan, it was Uncle Frank. In the mixed imagination of family lore, Frank was known as a chronic gambler, self-proclaimed philosopher, prodigious alcoholic, and an innate con artist. Yet, Brogan knew him only for his birthday cards. They arrived every year, not always on his birthday, with the distinct trace of a gasoline smell, accompanied by a $10 check that Brogan was never allowed to cash, plus Frank''s words of advice that ranged from profane to the sublime.

Two days shy of his eighteenth birthday, Brogan awakes on the morning of Thanksgiving break to find that his estranged Uncle Frank is waiting at his doorstep. Haunted by the recent suicide of his best friend, Brogan is seduced by the mystery of Frank, a man he has never met, and his life of risk and abandonment. He agrees to a road trip - not sanctioned by his parents - that will take them from New Jersey to Key West, Florida.

Brogan''s future is promising. The best student in his prestigious New Jersey preparatory school, he has recently accepted a full academic scholarship to MIT. But Brogan will discover Frank''s world of misfits and mobsters, including Bogota, an enormous ex-mobster transvestite that could rip apart a freight train. Frank''s life threatens everyone around him and exposes the hardship of tangled family relationships and the lies and secrets we keep to protect others.

FRANK is a combustible, darkly comic, and intriguing mix of the deadpan ferocity of an underworld chronicle that we see in works like Denis Johnson''s Angels and Donald Ray Pollack''s The Devil All the Time, with the distinct, surreal touch of David Lynch, if he had ever taken a four-day road trip to Key West.

Dead men tell no tales, or so the pirate maxim goes. But when facing execution in 1831 for mutiny and murder, the previously enigmatic pirate Charles Gibbs recounted the infamous crimes of his harrowing life at sea in a self-aggrandizing series of ""confessions."" Wildly popular reading among nineteenth-century audiences, such criminal confessions were peppered with the romanticized mythology that informs pirate lore to this day. Joseph Gibbs takes up the task of separating fact from fiction to explicate the true story of Charles Gibbs - an alias for James Jeffers (1798-1831) of Newport, Rhode Island - in an investigation that reveals a life as riveting as the legend it replaces. Jeffers was the child of a Revolutionary War privateer captain with his own history in the ""rough work."" After a heroic career in the U.S. Navy during the War of 1812, Jeffers eschewed military life and took to the privateer trade himself. As Charles Gibbs, pirate, he sailed from the ports of Charleston and New Orleans to wreak havoc in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Stripping away 170 years of embellishment, Joseph Gibbs maps the still-shockingly violent career of Charles Gibbs across the seas and, in the process, challenges and discredits much of his self-made mythology. Gibbs recounts Jeffers' well-documented role in the infamous mutiny and murders in 1830 aboard the brig Vineyard while the vessel was carrying a load of Mexican silver. The pirate was captured the following year and brought to New York. The case against Jeffers and accomplice Thomas Wansley culminated in a sensational trial, which led to their subsequent executions by hanging on Ellis Island. In addition to recounting the exploits of a ruthless cutthroat, ""The Confessions of ""Charles Gibbs"""" tells the larger story of American piracy and privateering in the early nineteenth century and illustrates the role of American and European adventurers in the Latin American wars of liberation. Carefully researched, engagingly written, and enhanced by twenty illustrations, this is pirate history at its most credible and readable.

Historian Hugh D. H. Soar is joined by Mark Stretton, master blacksmith, and Joseph Gibbs, bowyer, in order to demonstrate how a war bow and its associated arrow heads and shafts may have been constructed and used. In addition to showing the complete manufacture of a bow from tree selection to stringing and how specialized arrowheads were forged and attached to shafts, Secrets of the English War Bow provides information on the actual performance of the war bow, including the bow's effectiveness against various materials and, for the first time, its useagainst moving targets, since bows were often drawn against mounted soldiers. Armed with this new information, Soar provides an analysis of both successes and failures of the war bow in several important battles. Illustrated in color and black and white, Secrets of the English War Bow provides an invaluable service for those interested in medieval military history, archery, and technology.--De re Militari

In addition to being commercialised and romanticised, piracy's history has also been distorted, with many works straying far from the facts recorded in the Age of Sail. In this book, author Joseph Gibbs goes back to many of the original materials about those who went "on the account" (a classic euphemism for piracy) to deliver an engaging, closely interpreted anthology of seven decades of primary sources. The text comprises original monographs, handbills, trial records, newspaper articles, and official reports that deal with piracy in and involving the Americas in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Joseph Gibbs annotates and explains these records in order to clarify the era's historical, legal, literary, and nautical references. Along the way readers will experience violent mutinies, vicious sea battles, anti-piracy raids on Louisiana islands and Latin American coasts, and the United States' first sustained encounter with the Barbary Corsairs. They will also catch glimpses of maritime brigands as remarkable as any that walked the decks of piracy's earlier "golden age" and encounter the naval officers and sailors who strove to bring them to rough justice. Enhanced with period maps and illustrations, the book provides an enlightening introduction to piracy's original canon as it emerged in the era of the quill pen and hand-turned press.

Piracy along American coastlines and in the Caribbean in the late 1600s and early 1700s is often seen today through a colourful set of modern media archetypes. The reality, however, was usually more ugly and frequently lethal. In this book, author Joseph Gibbs goes back to original memoirs, monographs, newspaper articles, and trial records to present a stark picture of piracy in the era of Blackbeard, Bartholomew Roberts, and Ann Bonny and Mary Read. A "prequel" to Gibbs' well received On the Account: Piracy and the Americas, 1766-1835, this book similarly presents primary sources chosen for authenticity. The contents are introduced, annotated, and carefully edited for modern readers. They offer a glimpse of piracy far removed from, and often more engaging than, the romanticised version provided by later writers and filmmakers. They describe, for example, the ordeal-filled marches of the Caribbean boucaniers, who were tough enough to eat leather while sacking the cities of the Spanish empire. They also shed light on the pirates' tactics at sea and on land; their practice of "forcing" captives to join them; their often-sadistic cruelty; and their ships' "articles" and the primitive democratic standards they upheld. Enhanced with classic maps and illustrations, The Golden Age offers an unvarnished look at those who sailed and often died under the dreaded black and red flags of the era. Readers will see pirates as they actually were -- in pursuit of prey, in battle, and sometimes on the way to the gallows.