War, Technology, and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor - Softcover

Mindell, David A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801862507 ISBN 13: 9780801862502

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000

Synopsis

In a familiar story, the USS Monitor battled the CSS Virginia (the armored and refitted USS Merrimack) at Hampton Roads in March of 1862. In War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor, David A. Mindell adds a new perspective to the story as he explores how mariners―fighting "blindly" below the waterline―lived and coped with the metal monster they called 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 contemporary 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 strange 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 otherwise well-known history of the Monitor. It is no longer the story of the heroic inventor and his impenetrable weapon thrusting themselves upon a doubtful and conservative bureaucracy... It is no longer the story of a heroic battle and the machine's epic loss soon after. Rather it is a story of people experiencing new machinery, attempting 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 USS Monitor

About this title

About the Author

David A. Mindell is Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society and professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. He has degrees in Electrical Engineering and Literature from Yale University and a Ph.D. in the History of Technology from MIT. His research interests include the history of military technology, the history of electronics and computing, and archaeology in the deep ocean.

Review

An original and stimulating study that raises serious questions about relations between warriors and their death-dealing machinery.

(William J. Astore War, Literature and the Arts)

Well researched and wide in its scope, this work raises issues that transcend the Civil War and resonate in our own time.

(William M. Fowler, Jr. American Historical Review)

This book offers important new insights into the Monitor as a national icon, the ironclad's association with the modern U.S. Navy, and the evolving role of innovation and heroism in twenty-first-century warfare.

(Benjamin H. Trask Virginia Magazine of History and Biography)

Mindell's thought-provoking assessments and conclusions contribute to the understanding of how institutions and societies perceive and react to new technologies.

(Choice)

Mindell asserts that Monitor's mythical qualities were at least as important as her technological ones... Mindell's scholarly, yet entertaining and very readable book is an excellent and important work that should serve as a model for similar historical studies.

(John Broadwater International Journal of Nautical Archaeology)

Mindell provides an intriguing and richly textured analysis that makes effective use of contemporary diaries and other reports. These accounts help Mindell convey the flavor of life aboard the Monitor with candor and insight.

(John F. Guilmartin Jr. Journal of Southern History)

War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor impressed me with its combination of skilled analysis, convincing argument, and elegant prose. This is simply a gem of a book, and promises to be one of those small classics in the history of technology that sets a new standard for how the core questions of the field are framed and addressed.

(Robert Friedel, University of Maryland)

David Mindell has combined a sensitive and incisive reading of the documentary evidence with insightful historical analysis to illuminate not only his central theme, the experience of battle in an emerging machine age, but also the process of invention, negotiation, and politics that brought the Monitor into existence and the quite different process of narration, memory, and imagination that invested the ship and its exploits so heavily with symbolic meaning.

(Bart Hacker, Smithsonian Institution)

Edition details

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0801862507
• ISBN 13: 9780801862502
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200