Here are 100 books that Memoirs of Service Afloat During the War Between the States fans have personally recommended if you like
Memoirs of Service Afloat During the War Between the States.
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I’m a lover of the sea, ships, seamen, and their histories, particularly of navies in the Civil War. After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy (1967) with a history major, I served twenty years as a surface warfare officer (ship driver) on most oceans in ships ranging from destroyer to aircraft carrier and with river forces in Vietnam. I earned an M.A. in Political Science and an M.S. in Information Systems Management. Now as a historian, author, and speaker, I’m committed to communicating our naval heritage in an educational and entertaining manner for old hands and new generations. Writing about ships is the next best thing to driving them.
Although the Civil War was principally a land conflict, naval contributions were fundamental, not just peripheral or supporting. This excellent operational and campaign overview examines social, political, and technological revolutions in Western warfare leading to and through the struggle. It deals primarily with terrestrial warfare, but unlike many such works, places waterborne operations in context and gives the navy its due. Steam propulsion and industrial superiority produced massive Union naval power for a strangling blockade, fortress-busting warship squadrons, and an unprecedented riverine fleet. The Confederacy’s coasts and seaports constituted a third major theater while in the west, rivers were avenues of invasion and conquest. Chapter 5 contains a cogent discussion of “The Unfulfilled Promise of Joint [Army-Navy] Operations.” Highly recommended as a well-integrated military-naval history.
The Civil War represented a momentous change in the character of war. It combined the projection of military might across a continent on a scale never before seen with an unprecedented mass mobilization of peoples. Yet despite the revolutionizing aspects of the Civil War, its leaders faced the same uncertainties and vagaries of chance that have vexed combatants since the days of Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War. A Savage War sheds critical new light on this defining chapter in military history.
In a masterful narrative that propels readers from the first…
I’m a lover of the sea, ships, seamen, and their histories, particularly of navies in the Civil War. After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy (1967) with a history major, I served twenty years as a surface warfare officer (ship driver) on most oceans in ships ranging from destroyer to aircraft carrier and with river forces in Vietnam. I earned an M.A. in Political Science and an M.S. in Information Systems Management. Now as a historian, author, and speaker, I’m committed to communicating our naval heritage in an educational and entertaining manner for old hands and new generations. Writing about ships is the next best thing to driving them.
A lucid overview and fresh perspective will enlighten even a knowledgeable enthusiast of the topic while providing to new readers a solid grounding before engaging in more detailed studies. This short history by a foremost naval historian (170 pages plus ample notes and a bibliographical essay) fulfills both objectives. The chapters are thematic beginning with a review of the technological revolution in ships and guns, and then covering the distinct naval theaters from the encircling blockade, to the unique river war, major coastal campaigns, and worldwide commerce warfare. They contain insightful assessments of principal personalities including the secretaries of the navies and commanders on both sides. The flyleaf correctly describes the book as “an authoritative operational history of Civil War navies that is both readable and concise.”
This work provides an assessment of the crucial roles played by the Union and Confederate navies in the Civil War.
From Craig Symonds, author of the 2009 Lincoln Prize award-winner Lincoln and His Admirals, comes a fascinating look at the era when American naval power came of age. Thoroughly researched and excitingly written, it brings to light a wealth of new information on a pivotal aspect of the Civil War.
The Civil War at Sea covers navies on both sides of the conflict, examining key issues such as the impact of emergent technologies, the effectiveness of the Union's ambitious strategy…
I’m a lover of the sea, ships, seamen, and their histories, particularly of navies in the Civil War. After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy (1967) with a history major, I served twenty years as a surface warfare officer (ship driver) on most oceans in ships ranging from destroyer to aircraft carrier and with river forces in Vietnam. I earned an M.A. in Political Science and an M.S. in Information Systems Management. Now as a historian, author, and speaker, I’m committed to communicating our naval heritage in an educational and entertaining manner for old hands and new generations. Writing about ships is the next best thing to driving them.
“The cruise of a ship is a biography,” wrote Raphael Semmes about his ocean-straddling tall ship, CSS Alabama. “The ship becomes a personification. She not only, ‘walks the waters like a thing of life,’ but she speaks in moving accents to those capable of interpreting her.” In this excellent biography of Carondelet’s career, a squat, ugly, ironclad gunboat also becomes a major character along with the men who designed and built the revolutionary vessel, stoked her engines, and fired her big guns. In tactics and technology, riverine warfare was invented from scratch and indispensable to victory. This work (and Smith’s entire series on brown water war vessels) provides fresh and enlightening perspectives on every major battle down the Mississippi from Forts Henry and Donelson through Vicksburg to Red River.
The USS Carondelet had a revolutionary ship design and was the most active of all the Union's Civil War river ironclads. From Fort Henry through the siege of Vicksburg and from the Red River campaign through the Battle of Nashville, the gunboat was prominent in war legend and literature. This history draws on the letters of Ensign Scott Dyer Jordan and Rear Adm. It falls in the category of Henry Walke's memoirs.
I’m a lover of the sea, ships, seamen, and their histories, particularly of navies in the Civil War. After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy (1967) with a history major, I served twenty years as a surface warfare officer (ship driver) on most oceans in ships ranging from destroyer to aircraft carrier and with river forces in Vietnam. I earned an M.A. in Political Science and an M.S. in Information Systems Management. Now as a historian, author, and speaker, I’m committed to communicating our naval heritage in an educational and entertaining manner for old hands and new generations. Writing about ships is the next best thing to driving them.
Renowned naval engagements such as New Orleans and Mobile Bay are well covered by campaign studies and general histories but the Burnside Expedition is a neglected and fascinating operation described in this engaging work. With no precedent, procedures, or practice in massive joint operations, the frequently maligned General Ambrose Burnside teamed with Flag Officer Louis M. Goldsborough—commanding the Atlantic Blockading Squadron—to integrate Burnside’s “coastal division” with naval units and rag-tag merchant vessels into the first dedicated, rapid-deployment, amphibious force. In a series of engagements from February to April 1862 behind the barrier islands and in the sounds of North Carolina, they planned and executed textbook landings without a textbook, capturing the strategically vital region for the Union. With aggressive follow-up, the campaign might have shortened the conflict.
I am a history professor at Ohio State, where I have taught for most of my career. I have always been fascinated by how people in different regions define their own identities, how other Americans perceive them, and how these ideas change over time. Having lived through several wars (as a civilian), I have observed that social and political conflicts on the homefront can be intense in their own right and that non-military events and military events are often connected. In my work, I have published on gender, race, slavery, family, material culture, legal history, and environmental history, from the Revolution through the Civil War.
Storey reveals that a substantial number of white Alabamians strongly opposed secession and the Confederacy.
The homefront, much like the battlefield, was a scene of protracted power struggles. This is also an important work on historical memory, for after 1865, these Unionists were forgotten.
I loved this book, and many students love reading it.
Though slavery was widespread and antislavery sentiment rare in Alabama, there emerged a small loyalist population, mostly in the northern counties, that persisted in the face of overwhelming odds against their cause. Margaret M. Storey's welcome study uncovers and explores those Alabamians who maintained allegiance to the Union when their state seceded in 1861, and beyond. Storey's extensive, groundbreaking research discloses a socioeconomically diverse group that included slaveholders and nonslaveholders, business people, professionals, farmers, and blacks. By considering the years 1861-1874 as a whole, she clearly connects loyalists' sometimes brutal wartime treatment with their postwar behavior.
History and historical fiction are my abiding passions, and as a child of the Missouri Ozarks, I’ve always been drawn to depictions of Midwestern and rural life in particular. I have studied 19th-century utopian communities for many years and have always been fascinated by the powerful appeal of such communities, and the internal dynamics that always seem to arise within them. My novel series follows the rise and decline of one such community, using it as a microcosm for American culture in general. What might seem like a byway of American history is to me a powerful source of insight.
The Civil War west of the Mississippi doesn’t get much attention in historical fiction, but it’s an incredibly rich period, with storylines and characters to fill a hundred books. Morkan’s Quarry is one of my favorites from that period. It’s set in Springfield, Missouri, the site of one of the war’s first major battles. Michael Morkan operates a rock quarry just outside of town, and rock quarries have one product on hand that is highly prized during wartime – gunpowder. Michael and his son Leighton soon learn how thin the veneer of civilization is once a war is underway. The Civil War in Missouri was characterized by day-to-day savagery, private violence, and disrespect for the “rules” of warfare, and Morkan’s Quarry captures that spirit all too well.
In 1861, the Civil War severs Michael Morkan from everything he loves and all that defines him--from his son, Leighton; from his love, Cora Slade; and from the quarry he owns in Springfield, Missouri. Forced to give his black powder to the Missouri State Guard, he finds himself indelibly labeled a rebel traitor and is imprisoned in St. Louis. Back in the Ozarks, Leighton joins the Federal Home Guards in hopes of paroling his father. When Leighton finally frees him, the two are pitched in a last gambit for their quarry and for the legacy of the name Morkan.
I am a retired teacher, author, and researcher/presenter focusing on the real boys of the American Civil War. A Ray Bradbury short story in The Saturday Evening Post back in 1963 first sparked my interest. It focused on a drummer and his general at the Battle of Shiloh–a two-page conversation between them. There was no action. A teenager then, I decided I could do better and began what decades later would become my 4-book series, Journey Into Darkness, a story in four parts. In the years that followed, I became a middle-grade teacher, and my students learned about the Civil War by way of their peers.
One of the boys whose story I frequently share in my presentations is 12-year-old Gustave Shurmann. During the war, he had a fascinating experience, serving four different generals as a regimental bugler and spending time in the White House with Tad Lincoln.
I thoroughly enjoyed how William Styple researched Gus’s life and then turned it into a novel through which young readers could live history with Gus through a great story. I appreciated sharing Gus’s life in both formats as I lived it with him while reading this book and researched it, including in Gus’s own words, through excerpts from his own writings.
I’ve been reading and writing stories for as long as I can remember—and the weird ones have always been my favorite. I discovered many of my favorite books by wandering into my local library, telling the librarian about my strange reading interests, and allowing them to set me up with literary masterpieces of the most unusual kind. Once I knew how to bend the rules of genre and form to create something original, I took to creating my own weird stories, and have been doing so ever since in my novels, short stories, D&D characters, and bedtime stories for my bird.
A Prayer for the Dying is the only full-length novel I’ve ever read entirely in second-person perspective—which makes for a white-knuckle-grip adventure as the narrator drags the reader along a dark, haunted path, which is also a little bit on fire.
This ghost story full of living people (at first) follows a hard-working and dedicated protagonist who tries to protect his little town of Friendship as it faces disaster after horrible disaster. The narrative of the story unfurls like a tidal wave—terrifying, yet impossible to look away from as it sweeps away everything in its path. This scary story is definitely not for the faint of heart.
Set in a leafy Wisconsin town just after the American Civil War, this story opens one languid summer's day. Only slowly do events reveal themselves as sinister as one neighbour after another succumbs to a creeping, fatal disease.
I'm a lifetime, passionate reader. During the summer vacations, my brother and I would often ride with our father to his job in downtown Mobile and walk to Mobile Public Library, where we would spend all day exploring and reading. Well-written novels with remarkable but believable characters—such as those I've noted here are my passion. I have included novels in my list where I can identify personally with the protagonist. My list of books is varied. They have one thing in common: believable characters who struggle with life—authored by legitimate wordsmiths. When I wrote Angry Heavens as a first-time novelist, it was my history as a reader that I used as a writer.
Whether one is a Civil War buff, or a fan of Sun Tzu’s military strategy, you will find plenty of both in this three-volume set. Volume 1 is: Fort Sumter to Perryville. Volume 2 is: Fredericksburg to Meridian, and Volume 3 is: Red River to Appomattox.
Shelby Foote’s work provided most of the background of Ken Burn’s PBS epic, The Civil War. Anyone who watched that masterpiece and heard the knowledge of Shelby Foote spoken in the most lovely Southern drawl, will not be disappointed in this collection.
The Civil War: A Narrative – 3 volume box set provided significant detail and motivation for me as I wrote my own book. When I had a question about a date, geography of a battle, written correspondence between fighters or allies, or conversations such as took place at Appomattox Courthouse between Generals Grant and Lee, I went immediately to Shelby Foote’s three-volume…
This first volume of Shelby Foote's classic narrative of the Civil War opens with Jefferson Davis’s farewell to the United Senate and ends on the bloody battlefields of Antietam and Perryville, as the full, horrible scope of America’s great war becomes clear. Exhaustively researched and masterfully written, Foote’s epic account of the Civil War unfolds like a classic novel.
Includes maps throughout.
"Here, for a certainty, is one of the great historical narratives…a unique and brilliant achievement, one that must be firmly placed in the ranks of the masters."—Van Allen Bradley, Chicago Daily News
Having penned several history books, Historical Fiction is as natural to me as wooden teeth were to George Washington. And hopefully, my writing speaks as authentically. But Historical Fiction’s real attraction is that it not only adds realism and depth but also offers readers the chance to learn about our past in an enjoyable format that isn’t tedious or boring. Naturally, that’s if it's crafted well. However, history shouldn’t be just a backdrop, its myriad of events should impact the characters’ lives, and in turn, impact the reader. In that vein, Historical Fiction packs a punch to the intellect and emotions. So I hope you’ll enjoy these timeless classics.
John Jakes’s trilogy is a huge investment of time, but for those who love family sagas, American history and intriguing conflicts, it's a huge banquet to sink your teeth into. This sprawling saga drew me in with its inevitable chain of events, namely the Civil War, and how it split families and friends apart due to a military conflict, one that threatened to split the nation apart and with profound humanitarian rights at its core. Superbly written and even beautifully captured on film, John Jake’s magnum opus is a winner.
Part one of the #1 New York Times bestselling North and South Trilogy—the Civil War saga that inspired the classic television miniseries North and South—with over five million copies sold!
“An entertaining…authentic dramatization of American history.”—The New York Times
From master storyteller John Jakes comes the epic story of two families—the Hazards and the Mains. Separated by vastly different ways of life, joined by the unbreakable bonds of true friendship, and torn asunder by a country on the brink of a bloody conflict that will irrevocably change them all…
