Sea Power
This book is a naval history from the earliest times to 1960. It is a Navy ROTC textbook edited by E.B. Potter and Chester Nimitz. The names of the contributors are a who's who of mid to late century naval history. It was a gift to me from a former Naval Aviator friend who was a Navy ROTC instructor at Notre Dame University in the middle 1960s. He's also the definition of "crusty old fart."
The book isn't short, almost 900 pages. It is also an extremely good read with nuggets of information that will fill out a lot of little gaps in history even for a majority of the most dedicated history buffs. For example:
Lord Horatio Nelson's liason with Emma Hamilton was a scandal not only because he was married to a highly respected woman at the time but also because she had personal ties to people connected with Napoleon.
The cultural and economic animosity between the northern and southern states had serious repercussions much earlier than I realized. The southern states opposed the Navy Act of 1794 because of their belief that a navy only served to protect northern commercial interests.
Speaking of the War Between the States - the Anaconda Policy (the blockade) was extremely effective in large part because the Confederacy may have been agricultural but it didn't grow enough food crops because of its heavy investment in cotton. Because imports of food were cut off by the "Yankee Navy" both on the coasts and through control of the Mississippi river the south was literally starving to death. As an aside, blockade runners were no help. They mostly brought in luxury goods, expensive fabrics, high end liquor, expensive corsetry and the like. Even a Confederate law prohibiting profiteering didn't deter them. After all, it was a business, and it didn't matter that the Confederacy had a much greater need for opiates, for instance, than expensive consumer goods. As an aside, my mother told me that her grandmother who was a child in the War Between the States in coastal Texas recalled her mother (they were "gentry") putting in special orders for fabric with a local blockade runner.
Well that's just the tip of the iceberg. The books been out of print for decades but is still available on line and is a valuable addition to the collection of anyone seriously interested in Naval History.
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