A 3.5 page review from over in
@rebelatsea 's 'neck-of-the-woods'...
Civil War Book Review
Winter 2019 Article 11
Engines of Rebellion: Confederate Ironclads and Steam Engineering in the American Civil War
by Trevor Cox
University of Wolverhampton,
[email protected]
Trevor Cox is a visiting lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom where he is currently teaching courses on the American Civil War and Combined Operations in the American Civil War. He is currently producing a book manuscript The American Civil War and the British Imperial Dilemma: How Canadian Confederation was born of the Anglo- American Crises of 1861-1867.
Excerpt;
The book provides a power plant inventory for each of the Confederate vessels launched. Highly technical and forensic in this examination of steam machine configuration, it makes itself more user-friendly in providing an extensive glossary explaining specialist
terminology, in reproducing diagrams, plans, and cross-sections, and in offering contemporary paintings and photographs of several of the warships. The in-depth specifications of the vessels are also supplemented by biographies which relate the profiles and experiences of the constructors, engineers, and operators who served on board, in addition to the combat actions in which they were engaged. This further increases the monograph’s accessibility, as does Bisbee categorising the ironclads into standardised ‘classes’, these groupings comprising each of the subsequent chapters. The classes were essentially defined by evolving design characteristics, though the author acknowledges it to be a slightly arbitrary tool of convenience as Confederate administrators struggled to work to neat blueprints - forced into constant improvisation by the South’s weak industrial base, material and manpower shortages, scarcity of ship yards/dry docks, and time pressures bought on the war.
https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3388&context=cwbr
1013
Cheers,
USS ALASKA