Matthew Calbraith Perry

"This interpretive biography of Matthew Calbraith Perry - the first to appear in well over thirty years - offers a balanced assessment of the commodore's long and varied career as one of the U.S. Navy's preeminent officers of the antebellum era. Best remembered for leading a naval and diplomatic expedition to Japan in 1853, Perry succeeded where others before him had failed with the signing of a treaty that established formal diplomatic relations between the United States and Japan and ended Japan's isolation from the West. To this day Perry remains a respected figure in Japan as well as in the United Slates."--BOOK JACKET.