(Watson, Robert) Robert P. Watson, PhD, has published over three dozen nonfiction books, two encyclopedia sets, three novels, and hundreds of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, and reference essays on topics in politics and history. A frequent media commentator, Watson has been interviewed internationally and serves as the political analyst for WPTV 5 (NBC) in Florida. For many years he was also a Sunday columnist with the Sun-Sentinel newspaper. Watson’s recent books include The Nazi Titanic, The Presidents’ Wives, Affairs of the State, and America’s First Crisis, which received the 2014 Gold Medal in History from the Independent Publishers’ Association. His latest book is The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn: An Untold Story from the American Revolution (Da Capo Press) which tells the story of the most horrific struggle of the American Revolution which occurred just 100 yards off New York, where more men died aboard a rotting prison ship than were lost to combat during the entirety of the war. The HMS Jersey, was a living hell for thousands of Americans either captured by the British or accused of disloyalty. Crammed below deck, without light or fresh air, the prisoners were scarcely fed food and water. Disease ran rampant and human waste fouled the air as prisoners suffered mightily at the hands of brutal British and Hessian guards. Revealing for the first time hundreds of accounts culled from old newspapers, diaries, and military reports, Watson follows the lives and ordeals of the ship’s few survivors to tell the astonishing story of the cursed ship that killed thousands of Americans and yet helped secure victory in the fight for independence.
