Prizefighter
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.
- Kevin Kenny, New York University, author of The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United StatesA 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.
- Carlo Rotella, author of Cut Time and Good With Their HandsAn 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.
- Kasia Boddy, University of Cambridge, author of Boxing: A Cultural HistoryIn reconstructing the globe-trotting hit-and-run life of Francis Ambrose (Yankee Sullivan), Patrick Griffin offers a new angle on the birth of the modern age. It’s a gripping tale that encompasses famine, indentured labor, numerous ships, saloons and jails, and of course the spectacular prize fights that made Sullivan a nineteenth-century celebrity.
Patrick Griffin is the Madden-Hennebry Family Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and Bye-Fellow of St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge. He has published a number of books, most recently The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The Fall and Rise of a Connected World.
