This book offers original insights into a quirky quintet of naval heroes of the American Revolution. In ""Captains Contentious"" accomplished maritime historian Louis Arthur Norton observes that many of the captains of the Continental Navy were quite obstinate as compared to their British counterparts. In doing so Norton surveys the lives and military accomplishments of five captains in the nascent Continental Navy, investigating how their personality flaws both hindered their careers and enhanced their heroics in Revolutionary War combat. This psychohistorical approach brings to life the idiosyncratic personalities of John Manley, Silas Talbot, Dudley Saltonstall, Joshua Barney, and that most quarrelsome of characters, John Paul Jones. Norton's fast-paced account of intertwining naval actions also serves as a maritime history of the war as experienced by these men. Norton draws from a wealth of primary and secondary sources to present biographical sketches that illustrate the five captains' reckless bravado and frequent antagonism toward their fellow officers. Representing different colonies and originating from diverse social and economic backgrounds, this dysfunctional band of fractious mariners shared a common lust for glory and penchant for infighting as they pursued favor and rank at the expense of civility and cooperation. They were often at odds with the Continental Congress and Marine Committee that commanded them and openly feuded among themselves. Yet they still managed to achieve notable victories against superior British naval forces. To understand better how these naval heroes turned dysfunction into derring-do, Norton reads their distinctive personalities against the contrasting demeanor of their adversaries in the British ranks. He concludes with psychological inferences about the leadership qualities displayed by these captains, which proved to be strikingly valuable in sea combat. Norton's study offers new insights into the maritime history of the American Revolution as well as an original hypothesis about the psychological traits useful to good naval command.

A classic on the Confederacy's failure to build a successful navy In Confederate Shipbuilding, William N. Still Jr. cogently demonstrates the real grounds for the Confederacy's failure to build a successful navy. The South's major problems with shipbuilding concerned facilities, materials, and labor. To each of these subjects the author devotes a chapter, and then concludes by joining these problems to the larger issues of the Civil War. Still argues that the Confederate navy's difficulties in construction were mainly caused by military, geographic, and political factors--not by lack of resources or the inefficiency of Southern naval officers. Problems caused by internal dissension--states' rights quarrels and interservice rivalries--were characteristic of other theaters of the war; yet, Still shows, the navy was particularly affected, being the stepchild of a war department that was land-minded. This careful study therefore contributes not only to our understanding of the failure of the Southern shipbuilding program, but also to our knowledge of the reasons for the downfall of the Confederate States of America.

Everyone knows the story of the battle of the Monitor and the Merrimack. But how many people know the story behind the Confederacy's attempt to build a fleet of armorclad vessels of war? When the Civil War began, the South had virtually no navy, few seamen, and limited shipbuilding facilities. In order to defend its ports against a well-established Northern navy, the South had to resort to innovation, and the Confederate ironclad navy was born. The Confederate government commissioned and put into operation twenty-two armorclad vessels of war. This is their story. From the inception of the program, through the problems of building the vessels, through the careers of the vessels themselves (including gripping battle descriptions), to their eventual destruction or surrender, it is all here. Iron Afloat is history that reads like a novel and will appeal to readers interested in the Civil War and Confederacy as well as to military and naval historians.

In this widely heralded book first published in 1986, four historians consider the popularly held explanations for southern defeat--state-rights disputes, inadequate military supply and strategy, and the Union blockade--undergirding their discussion with a chronological account of the war's progress. In the end, the authors find that the South lacked the will to win, that weak Confederate nationalism and the strength of a peculiar brand of evangelical Protestantism sapped the South's ability to continue a war that was not yet lost on the field.

This classic study examines the deployment of U.S. naval vessels in European and Near Eastern waters from the end of the Civil War until the United States declared war in April 1917. Initially these ships were employed to visit various ports from the Baltic Sea to the eastern Mediterranean and Constantinople (today Istanbul), for the primary purpose of showing the flag. From the 1890s on, most of the need for the presence of the American warships occurred in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Unrest in the Ottoman Empire and particularly the Muslim hostility and threats to Armenians led to calls for protection. This would continue into the years of World War I. In 1905, the Navy Department ended the permanent stationing of a squadron in European waters.From then until the U.S. declaration of war in 1917, individual ships, detached units, and special squadrons were at times deployed in European waters. In 1908, the converted yacht Scorpion was sent as station ship (stationnaire) to Constantinople where she would remain, operating in the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea until 1928. Upon the outbreak of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson ordered cruisers to northern European waters and the Mediterranean to protect American interests. These warships, however, did more than protect American interests. They would evacuate thousands of refugees, American tourists, Armenians, Jews, and Italians after Italy entered the conflict on the side of the Allies.

Victory Without Peace concentrates on the U.S. Navy in European and NearEastern waters during the post-World War I era. As participants in theVersailles peace negotiations, the Navy was charged with executing the navalterms of the Armistice as well as preserving stability and peace. U.S. warshipswere deploying into the Near East, Baltic, Adriatic, and Northern Europe, whilesimultaneously withdrawing its demobilized forces from European waters. Thissignifies the first time the U.S. Navy contributed to peacetime efforts, setting aprecedent continues today. Conversely, Congressional appropriations handicapped this deployment bydemobilization, general naval policy and postwar personnel, and operatingfunds reductions. Though reluctant to allocate postwar assets into seeminglyunimportant European and Near Eastern waters, the Navy was pressured by theState Department and the American Relief Administration's leader, HerbertHoover, to deploy necessary forces. Most of these were withdrawn by 1924 andthe European Station assumed the traditional policy of showing the flag.

Dead men tell no tales, or so the pirate maxim goes. But when facing execution in 1831 for mutiny and murder, the previously enigmatic pirate Charles Gibbs recounted the infamous crimes of his harrowing life at sea in a self-aggrandizing series of ""confessions."" Wildly popular reading among nineteenth-century audiences, such criminal confessions were peppered with the romanticized mythology that informs pirate lore to this day. Joseph Gibbs takes up the task of separating fact from fiction to explicate the true story of Charles Gibbs - an alias for James Jeffers (1798-1831) of Newport, Rhode Island - in an investigation that reveals a life as riveting as the legend it replaces. Jeffers was the child of a Revolutionary War privateer captain with his own history in the ""rough work."" After a heroic career in the U.S. Navy during the War of 1812, Jeffers eschewed military life and took to the privateer trade himself. As Charles Gibbs, pirate, he sailed from the ports of Charleston and New Orleans to wreak havoc in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Stripping away 170 years of embellishment, Joseph Gibbs maps the still-shockingly violent career of Charles Gibbs across the seas and, in the process, challenges and discredits much of his self-made mythology. Gibbs recounts Jeffers' well-documented role in the infamous mutiny and murders in 1830 aboard the brig Vineyard while the vessel was carrying a load of Mexican silver. The pirate was captured the following year and brought to New York. The case against Jeffers and accomplice Thomas Wansley culminated in a sensational trial, which led to their subsequent executions by hanging on Ellis Island. In addition to recounting the exploits of a ruthless cutthroat, ""The Confessions of ""Charles Gibbs"""" tells the larger story of American piracy and privateering in the early nineteenth century and illustrates the role of American and European adventurers in the Latin American wars of liberation. Carefully researched, engagingly written, and enhanced by twenty illustrations, this is pirate history at its most credible and readable.