Ironclad Legacy: Battles of the Uss Monitor

IRONCLAD LEGACY: BATTLES OF THE USS MONITOR ISBN 0-9621453-8-6 hardcover with color dust jacket 6 x 9 vertical, 280 pages, 43 color photos, 66 black & white photos When John Ericsson conceived his "impregnable battery" he had no idea that it would still be fighting battles a hundred years after his death. In the mid nineteenth century he struggled to have his concepts approved by distinguished industrialists mired in the past. But then came the War between the States, and the battle that forever changed the way naval strategists viewed warship design and ship-to-ship engagement. The Monitor and the Virginia fought to a standstill, neither ship inflicting significant damage upon the other. By the end of that year (1862) both ironclads were gone: the Virginia was blown up by her crew to prevent capture, the Monitor foundered in a gale off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. All was quiescent for more than a century, until the Monitor's badly deteriorated remains were positively identified in 1974. Within months an impregnable barrier was placed around the wreck site: a political artifice called a National Marine Sanctuary. The Monitor's next battle became a legal contest: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) wanted the ironclad as its own private research domain, the author wanted it open to the public for whom it had been established as a sanctuary. The controversy raged for six years, until the author won vindication in a court of law. He then led an expedition to the site and took dramatic underwater photographs that captured the Monitor the way it was in 1990--the way it will never be again. The book is amply illustrated with black and white historical photographs, as well as color photographs of the wreck as it appears on the bottom.