When I first published this research a decade ago the Barbary War was, to put it charitably, an understudied backwater of Jeffersonian scholarship. Indeed, at the time the two main English-language studies of the conflict remained those of Gardner Allen and Raymond Irwin from 1904 and 1931, respectively. Even the publication of virtually all relevant documents from the Navy Department in a six-volume edition at the time of the Second World War provided little temptation for further study. When I checked the volumes out of Alderman Library at the University of Virginia in 1994 I noted from the charge records that some were last taken from the shelves during the administration of Lyndon Johnson.

Indeed, the Barbary War remains one of those unusual historiographie cases where the bibliographic record becomes an integral part of the conflict itself, at least from the Jeffersonian side. At the highest level of generality, this is due partly to broad trends in American historiography that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s: less focus on diplomatic and military events, a disinterest in “elite” politics and the workings of statecraft, and a tendency to see American history as separate from contemporary European or Mediterranean experience. More specifically, Jefferson scholars had long been frustrated by the war because it does not mate well with received images of Jefferson's diplomatic conduct as either progressive and enlightened or woefully naïve and short on military power. Dumas Malone granted it but a short and uncomfortable chapter in his massive (and hagiographie) six-volume biography, and in their 1990 overview of Jefferson's foreign policy Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson relegated it to a footnote. For those eager to either praise Jefferson's transcendence of European balance-ofpower politics or critique his insufficiendy muscular statecraft, the Barbaiy War represents a difficult obstacle to navigate.

While the war has remained discreedy closeted from broad exposure for the better part of two centuries, the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001 fuelled an explosive growth in the literature. Since 2002 several popular books and multiple print and Web-based articles have offered appraisals of what one breathlessly described as “America's First War on Terror.” Previously, references to the Barbary War were as infrequent as sightings of comets; now a study of the conflict is part of the History Book Club.