I whose Monitors This blog has remained dormant for some time, I take it back like I left it: by reading notes. And to begin, a few verses:
Now I, a boat lost in the hair of coves, Hurled by the hurricane
in ether without bird, which I
Monitors and sailboats Han
would have fished carcass water drunk
Rimbaud is, of course, The Drunken Boat, written I believe in 1871. Monitor, "that will frown at the high school student on his tongue out to textual (although MM. Lagarde Michard and have certainly blessed with a footnote on page) in 1871, the name of this ship was a natural for a poet barely older than him. The Monitor was still, eight years after his short career (he sinks into the New Year's night 1863), a real celebrity.
is one of the objectives of D. Mindell in this book, War, Technology and Experience aboard The USS Monitor : to show how the Monitor -celebrity was built almost at the same time as the Monitor -ship, in an offensive to both psychological and Naval.
The facts are: the beginning of the Civil War (1861-1865), one of the main axes of the northern strategy was the complete blockade imposed on the Confederates. However, by early 1862, they had converted the old battleship ship Merrimack, burned at the beginning of the war, threatening to break the blockade. The Monitor, a kind of pocket battleship, was built in emergency to counter this threat. On 8 March 1862, he confronted the former Merrimack (now CSS Virginia) in the strategic crossing of Hampton Roads, exit Maritime Capital of Richmond and Southern main Confederate arsenal, Norfolk. The two ships survived the battle but finally withdrew the Virginia in Norfolk and it is scuttled on May 7 when taking Norfolk by the Union.
The Battle of Hampton Roads, quoiqu'indécise, remained as a symbol of the clash Merrimack and Monitor (power of alliteration: the name of Virginia not scored submissions), the irruption of the industry in the contemporary sense of the term, in the war. This is another axis of Mindell's book: to show the tension between this new war machines and tradition of the heroic warrior. Can be heroic behind impenetrable shield? The writers of the time (Hawthorne and Melville, among others) saw the birth of a war that humans would disappear. It is true that they saw no combat casualties, or nearly so, the Monitor on the bottom of the appalling butchery of ground combat ... Last
tension highlights the work: that between the Monitor calculated the actual Monitor. Its inventor, John Ericsson, has played an active part in the celebrity of the Monitor, on which he built his own - a character misunderstood inventor struggling against all the conservatism which he triumphs, finally, in Hampton's Road, the reality is more complex. First, if the Monitor is innovative, it is not revolutionary: there were battleships in France and Great Britain before it, including a propulsion propeller about the guns on turrets, they been tested on the floating batteries of the Crimean War. Moreover, Ericsson has always refused to set foot on his ship stubbornly refused to admit the faults that he observed. His response to the officers was: "You are mistaken, I calculated everything." However, these problems were real and serious: for example, the Monitor is practically a submarine since the crew quarters and machinery were under the waterline (Jules Verne has also its Nautilus as "a kind of Monitor) - they depend so heavily on the ventilation system. The latter has been stifled by heavy seas, all the crew failed to perish gassed by his own machines while traveling to New York's Hampton Road ...
we can see, there are many good things in this book for anyone interested in the Monitor itself or more generally to mechanized fleets in the nineteenth century e . Some weaknesses, however: the confession of the author, the book is the expanded version of an article from a page in trentaie Technology and Culture (April 1995). However, if there are more elements in the book, it does not seem sure there have been enough to fill 180 pages ... Therefore, some chapters draw the line seriously and seems likely to applications of the publisher and to the needs of historical narrative. Chapter 3 develops the example biography of William Keeler officer aboard the Monitor and whose correspondence is a fundamental source on the ship. Thence to devote a chapter, there is not ... Chapter 8, meanwhile, is entirely devoted to the poem was written on Melville Monitor rather a long paraphrase, anyway. My advice: skip this entire chapter.
Despite these reservations, this is a nice little book to read and who taught me a lot.
References
David A. Mindell, War, Technology and Experience aboard The USS Monitor , Baltimore (MD) The John Hopkins University Press, 2000, 187pp.
David A. Mindell, "" The Blacksmith's That Clangor of Fray ": Technology, War, and Experience Aboard The USS 'Monitor', Culture & Technology , vol. 36, No. 2 (April 1995) , pp.242-270.
The illustrations are drawn by John Ericsson, Contribution To The Centennial Exhibition , 1876, reproduced in the article Technology & Culture cited, p. 247.
Everyone brought their''local''drink, and eating is going well until our friends Caldéniacienne who missed their connection in Paris. 
The hard work begins after the noon meal prepared by Carol''that has''pampered all weekend. 
passionate, old Blois. Back to 
About 1 'behind, Cecile surrounded by her bodyguards,''arrives with a smile.'' 
