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
David A. Mindell is Dibner Associate Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society 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. He is currently working on a history of feedback, control, and computing in the twentieth century, and on locating and imaging ancient shipwrecks and settlements in the deep regions of the Black Sea.
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 2003
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