Nicholas Guyatt, "The Hated Cage: An American Tragedy in Britain's Most Terrifying Prison" (Basic Books, 2022)

New Books in African American Studies · Apr 18, 2023 · 1h 7m

After the War of 1812, more than five thousand American sailors were marooned in Dartmoor Prison on a barren English plain; the conflict was over but they had been left to rot by their government. Although they shared a common nationality, the men were divided by race: nearly a thousand were Black, and at the behest of the white prisoners, Dartmoor became the first racially segregated prison in US history. The Hated Cage: An American Tragedy in Britain's Most Terrifying Prison (Basic Books, 2022) documents the extraordinary but separate communities these men built within the prison--and the…