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War, Technology, and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor

Amazon.com Price:  $15.98 (as of 06/05/2019 03:34 PST- Details)

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Description

In a familiar story, the usMonitor battled the CSS Virginia (the armored and refitted USS Merrimack) at Hampton Roads in March of 1862. In War, Technology, and Experience aboard the usMonitor, David A. Mindell adds a new standpoint to the story as he explores how mariners―fighting “blindly” below the waterline―lived and coped with the metal monster they referred to as the “iron coffin.” Mindell shows how the iron warship emerged as an idea and became practicable, how building it drew upon and forced changes in up to date manufacturing technology, and how the vessel captured the nineteenth-century American popular and literary imaginations.

Combining technical, personal, administrative, and literary analysis, Mindell examines the experience of the men aboard the Monitor and their reactions to the thrills and dangers that accompanied the new machine. The invention surrounded men with iron and threatened their heroism, their self-image as warriors, even their lives. Mindell also examines responses to this odd new warship by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, who prophetically saw in the Civil War a portent of the mechanized warfare of the future. The story of the Monitor shows how technology changes not only the tools but also the very experience of combat, generating effects that are still felt today in the era of “smart bombs” and pushbutton wars.

“We find new significance in the another way well-known history of the Monitor. It’s no longer the story of the heroic inventor and his impenetrable weapon thrusting themselves upon a doubtful and conservative bureaucracy… It’s no longer the story of a heroic battle and the machine’s epic loss soon after. Slightly this is a story of people experiencing new machinery, making an attempt to make sense of its thrills, constrictions, and politics, and sensing its power and impotence―both in glory and frustration.”―from War, Technology, and Experience aboard the usMonitor

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