About the Author

Douglas Edward Leach (1920-2003) was a distinguished scholar and professor of American history. Leach spent the last three decades of his career at Vanderbilt University. Among his achievements were Fulbright Lectureships at the Universities of Liverpool, England, and Auckland, New Zealand. His other published works include The Northern Colonial Frontier, 1607-1763; Arms for Empire; and Roots of Conflict: British Armed Forces and Colonial Americans, 1677-1763. Leach’s final book, Now Hear This: The Memoir of a Junior Naval Officer in the Great Pacific War, won the John Lyman Book Award of the North American Society for Oceanic History.