Prizefighter
Yankee Sullivan and the Hands That Built the Modern World
Format:Hardback
Publisher:University of Virginia Press
Publishing:8th Oct '26
£27.99
This title is due to be published on 8th October, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
The globetrotting champion of the oppressed who shook his fist at the world in an era of profound change
Prizefighter is the extraordinary saga of James "Yankee" Sullivan, who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, traveled the globe as a refugee, convict, laborer, and pugilist—and helped bring our modern world into being. Sullivan was born as Francis Ambrose in Ireland in 1813, ventured to London as a boy, was arrested for thieving and shipped to Australia (where he learned to box), escaped from New Zealand on a whaler, won his first match out of Liverpool, reigned as a prizefighter and leading political figure in New York City in the 1840s, moved to Gold Rush California, coached the king of Hawaii in boxing, and spent his last days in a jail cell in San Francisco in 1856. But Sullivan's life story is much more than a tale of adventure. He helped tie together a world being redefined by free trade, mass migration, industrialization, and democracy, becoming both a champion in the ring and a champion of the people. In this first era of globalization, as the life of Yankee Sullivan attests, prizefighters were world-makers.
"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
ISBN: 9780813955940
Dimensions: 235mm x 156mm x 25mm
Weight: unknown
384 pages