Inside a U.S. Embassy is widely recognized as the essential guide to the Foreign Service. This all-new third edition takes readers to more than fifty U.S. missions around the world, introducing Foreign Service professionals and providing detailed descriptions of their jobs and firsthand accounts of diplomacy in action. In addition to profiles of diplomats and specialists around the world-from the ambassador to the consular officer, the public diplomacy officer to the security specialist-is a selection from more than twenty countries of day-in-the-life accounts, each describing an actual day on.

"As a British colony Americans relied on the far-flung British consular system to take care of their sailors and merchants, but after the Revolution they had to scramble to create an American service. While the U.S. diplomatic establishment was confined to the major capitals of the world, U.S. consular posts proliferated to most of the major ports where the expanding American merchant marine called. As consular appointments were often used as a reward for authors and other talented people, the U.S. Consular Service could boast of such noteworthy members as Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fennimore Cooper, and William Dean Howells. Winston Churchill's grandfather was an American consul, as was Fiorello La Guardia, later mayor of New York"--Unedited summary from book cover.

This volume provides new insights into the role of U.S. consuls in the Ottoman Middle East in the special context of the Holy Land. The motivations and functioning of the American consuls in Jerusalem, and of the consular agents in Jaffa and Haifa, are analyzed as part of the US diplomatic and consular activity throughout the world, and of Western involvement in the Ottoman Empire and in Palestine during the century preceding World War I. The processes of cultural, demographic, economic, environmental, and settlement change and the contribution of the US consuls and American settlers to development of and modernization of Palestine are discussed. Based on primary archival sources such facets as the role of consuls regarding the use of extraterritorial privileges, Western religious and cultural penetration, control of land and land purchase, non-Muslim settlement, judicial systems, and technological innovations are considered from American, Ottoman, and local viewpoints.

Relates the story of the politically motivated kidnapping of Charlie Fortnum, a minor British functionary in Argentina.

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"This is the first-ever biography of Thomas Barclay, the first American consul to serve the United States abroad and the man who, in 1786, successfully negotiated our first treaty with an Arab, African, or Muslim nation. It is the story of an Ulster-born immigrant building his fortune as a Philadelphia merchant in international trade, then losing it as he gives priority to his adopted country's fight to gain and build on independence. It tells how, after emigrating to Philadelphia in the 1760s, Barclay became a leading member of the Irish community, a successful merchant/ship owner, and political activist. This biography follows his move to France with his wife and three small children when the Continental Congress named him consul in 1781. There, before an American consular service existed, before Congress knew a consul from a consul general, Thomas Barclay did whatever was needed, wherever it was needed. To shipping, naval, and other tasks, Congress added an audit of American public expenditures in Europe since 1776. Then Jefferson and Adams added diplomacy in Barbary, where Barclay negotiated a rare tribute-free treaty of commerce and amity with the Sultan of Morocco. His personal relationships with Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson reveal as much about them as about him. On assignment for President Washington in 1793, he became the first American diplomat to die in a foreign country in the service of the United States."--BOOK JACKET.

William Alexander Leidesdorff is probably one of the best-kept secrets in the pioneering of the West and the creation of the State of California. Born out of wedlock in St. Croix, Danish West Indies in 1810 to a Jewish Danish sugar planter and a black plantation worker, he went on to become the first Black millionaire when gold was found on his property shortly before he died in 1848.