Roger Ekirch is an award-winning historian, whose writings have been translated into eight languages. A graduate of Dartmouth College, he obtained his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. Since 1977, he has taught at Virginia Tech. Along with three other books and sundry scholarly articles, he has written columns for the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch. His path-breaking research on the history of sleep has been profiled in publications ranging from the Smithsonian Magazine and the Financial Times to Applied Neurology and Scientific American Mind. Professor Ekirch has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and in 1981-1982 became the first Paul Mellon Fellow at Cambridge University. In 1998, he received a coveted Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. His last book, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (2005), won four awards, including a prize given by the history honor society Phi Alpha Theta for the “best subsequent book” in all fields of history.
Although the inspiration for five novels, Annesley’s ordeal has attracted scant attention from historians, in part because the principal primary source associated with his abduction is a volume, first published in 1743, entitled Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman, Return’d from a Thirteen Years Slavery in America. . . .Upon my first encounter twenty-five years ago with this text, of which Annesley was not the author, my own reaction was much the same as that of other historians— to dismiss it out of hand as fiction, and bad fiction at that. A reprint, in fact, appeared in 1975 as part of Garland Publishing’s “Flowering of the Novel” series.More recently, a stray reference to Annesley’s tribulations in an obscure English diary in Oxford’s Bodleian Library caused me to probe further, only to discover transcripts of court proceedings held in London as well as Dublin. And, too, along with newspaper reports, I was fortunate enough to locate nearly four hundred legal depositions, wholly pertaining to Jemmy’s youth, in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin and in the National Archives outside London. Although few scraps of personal correspondence have survived, members of the Annesleys, an English family who over the course of the 1600s achieved wealth and fame in Ireland on a grand scale, left a vast trove of legal documents in their wake.My aim has been to use this small mountain of evidence to relate the fascinating story of Annesely’s life with as much attention to accuracy and historical detail as possible. There is next to no reliance upon literary theory, nor is the book highly analytical apart from the occasional paragraph in which I endeavor to expand upon the broader context of events, whether it be the kidnapping trade, childrearing, or the issue of attorney-client privilege. In this regard, two models, which I aspired to emulate, were Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm and Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea. Both relate gripping stories, all the while paying scrupulous attention to the larger historical milieu.
Ekirch , Roger Birthright: The True Story that Inspired Kidnapped W. W. Norton 258 pages, 8 1/2 x 6 inches ISBN 978 0393066159
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