The Barbary Coast reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Barbary Coast

The Barbary Coast, or Barbary, was the term used by Europeans till the 19th century to refer to the coastal regions of what is now Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. The name is derived from the Berber people of north Africa. In the west, the name commonly evokes the Arab slave traders based on that coast, who captured and traded slaves from Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. It also evokes the Barbary pirates, based on the North African coast, who attacked shipping in the Mediterannean and North Atlantic.

"Barbary" was almost never a unified political entity. However, from a European perspective its "capital" or chief city was often considered to be Tripoli, in modern-day Libya, although Algiers, in Algeria, and Tangiers, in Morocco, were also sometimes seen as its "capital" by Europeans of the era. The first United States military action overseas, executed by the U.S. Marines and Navy, was the storming of Tripoli to end pirate raids from Barbary.

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Barbary Coast is also the former name of a neighborhood in San Francisco, California, and a 1935 movie directed by Howard Hawks.

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