Stories from the Wreckage: A Great Lakes Maritime History Inspired by Shipwrecks

John Odin Jensen has studied North American maritime frontier shipwrecks from the Grand Banks of Newfoundland to the edges of the Bering Sea. Born into a Norwegian-American seafaring family in Alaska, he began his maritime career working alongside his father and brother in the commercial fisheries in the 1970s, a time and place where shipwreck and death at sea were an accepted part of life. As a former crab boat captain and a shipwreck survivor, Jensen brings deep professional experience and personal sympathy to the study of the North American mariners, ships, and shipwrecks. His more than thirty years of Great Lakes experience began with a position as an engineer/deckhand aboard the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee research vessel Neeskay and continued with many seasons surveying shipwrecks as a professional underwater archaeologist with the Wisconsin Historical Society. In addition to his early seagoing education, Jensen earned a BA in history from Lawrence University, an MA in maritime history and underwater archaeology from East Carolina University, and MS and PhD degrees in history from Carnegie Mellon University. He is on the faculty of the department of history at the University of West Florida.