A History of the Confederate Navy

by Raimondo Luraghi, Paolo E. Coletta (Translator)

A landmark study that credits the Southern navy for its strategic successes, international range, and technical advances.

Genres: History, Civil War

514 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Tripp · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit too much detail overall for me. Some great high level analysis, but then too much detail in other places.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

A more traditionally written military history, where the focus is too much on the actual battles. He initially has a thesis about four key point to the confederate strategy, but doesn’t follow up on them strongly enough, so it ends up muddled between which ships executed successful commerce busting (which was one point), and all the various ironsides (funny how so many were lost more to incompetence rather then fell to Federal ships).

Also, minor quibble is the single reference to “blacks,” while never acknowledging whether they were enslaved or not. Which considering the lack of overall resources the South had, distinguishing that slave labor was the one item them had in abundance may have been a good point to clarify. Especially since it was really why the whole thing was happening in the first place....

[Doppia D · Rating 5 out of 5]

Appena finito, una sola parola mi baluginava nella mente: immenso.
Immenso nella documentazione, nella narrazione, nelle storie degli uomini e degli sforzi della Confederazione e della sua Marina... e non si può fuggire, alla immensa tristezza che trasmette...

[Sean Chick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a great read but a good analysis of the Confederate Navy and how it went from its early disasters to eventually succeeding in protecting the South's key ports.