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Gideon Welles’s 1861 appointment as secretary of the navy placed him at the hub of Union planning for the Civil War and in the midst of the powerful personalities vying for influence in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet. Although Welles initially knew little of naval matters, he rebuilt a service depleted by Confederate defections, planned actions that gave the Union badly needed victories in the war’s early days, and oversaw a blockade that weakened the South’s economy.

Perhaps the hardest-working member of the cabinet, Welles still found time to keep a detailed diary that has become one of the key documents for understanding the inner workings of the Lincoln administration. In this new edition, William E. and Erica L. Gienapp have restored Welles’s original observations, gleaned from the manuscript diaries at the Library of Congress and freed from his many later revisions, so that the reader can experience what he wrote in the moment. With his vitriolic pen, Welles captures the bitter disputes over strategy and war aims, lacerates colleagues from Secretary of State William H. Seward to General-in-Chief Henry Halleck, and condemns the actions of the self-serving southern elite he sees as responsible for the war. He just as easily waxes eloquent about the Navy's wartime achievements, extols the virtues of Lincoln, and drops in a tidbit of Washington gossip.

Carefully edited and extensively annotated, this edition contains a wealth of supplementary material. The appendixes include short biographies of the members of Lincoln’s cabinet, the retrospective Welles wrote after leaving office covering the period missing from the diary proper, and important letters regarding naval matters and international law.

“A major contribution to Civil War and naval history.” —Journal of Southern History 

The Civil War was fought not only on American battlefields but also in the shipyards, diplomatic salons, and ports of Europe. In this sweeping history of the Confederate navy’s operations overseas, Warren Spencer traces the South’s ambitious efforts to build, equip, and deploy a naval force across the Atlantic. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States, Great Britain, and France, the book reveals how Confederate agents, diplomats, and naval officers pursued international support while attempting to challenge Union power on the seas. 

More than a military narrative, this study offers a richly detailed examination of the intersection of naval warfare, diplomacy, and international politics. The author synthesizes scattered research and original documentary evidence to provide a comprehensive account of Confederate naval activity in Europe, illuminating the roles of shipbuilders, foreign governments, intelligence networks, and naval leaders. By engaging both published sources and archival records, the book presents fresh interpretations of controversial episodes and demonstrates how events far from American shores shaped the course of the Civil War. 

This volume will appeal to readers of Civil War history, naval history, diplomatic history, and international relations. Scholars, students, and history enthusiasts alike will appreciate its careful research, engaging narrative, and global perspective on a conflict too often viewed solely through a domestic lens. Anyone interested in the maritime dimensions of the Civil War or the Confederacy’s quest for recognition abroad will find this book both enlightening and compelling.

A revealing study on the little-known and misunderstood provincial navies established by North American British colonists.

In The First Fleets, Benjamin C. Schaffer reveals how, contrary to widespread beliefs, the American colonies had a long tradition of independent naval defense decades before the Revolution. He demonstrates that Anglo-American governments established and maintained significant provincial naval forces and that the history of provincial navies illuminates broader aspects of colonial history and the colonies’ ultimate break with the British Crown.

Based on meticulous research, Schaffer recounts the sea-borne threats that American colonies faced from the French, Spanish, pirates, and others. He reviews colonial governance and the relationships between colonial governments and Great Britain. Highlighting Britain’s scant naval power in North America, Schaffer demonstrates how the vulnerable coastal colonies undertook their own self-defense.

Schaffer’s readable study offers many fascinating episodes from colonial history. Establishing a navy was controversial in pacifist-minded, Quaker-dominated Pennsylvania. South Carolina deployed its scout-boat navy to pursue enslaved Africans who fled colonial capture. The first paper money issued in North America was an initiative to pay for a naval expedition against French Quebec in 1690. These and other episodes show the intimate connection between these little-known provincial navies and the major sociopolitical developments of their day.

The First Fleets will be of great interest to historians and readers of early American history, particularly colonial maritime and naval activities. Readers interested in the political and military dynamics of pre-Revolutionary America, as well as enthusiasts of naval history and maritime trade, will find The First Fleets both a valuable resource and an engrossing narrative.

How carrier-based air power helped define victory in the first hot war of the Cold War.

In The Naval Air War in Korea, Richard P. Hallion offers a compelling and authoritative account of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps air campaign during the Korean War, a conflict that marked a pivotal transition in the history of military aviation. Through meticulous research and engaging narrative, Hallion examines how carrier-based air power became a decisive factor in supporting United Nations forces across the Korean Peninsula.

From the desperate defense of the Pusan Perimeter and the dramatic Inchon landing to interdiction strikes, close air support missions, and air superiority operations, naval aviators demonstrated extraordinary adaptability in a rapidly changing battlefield environment. The conflict also witnessed the evolution of aviation technology as propeller-driven aircraft served alongside emerging jet fighters, foreshadowing the future of modern air warfare.

Hallion highlights the courage, innovation, and operational effectiveness of Navy and Marine pilots who flew from aircraft carriers positioned off Korea's coasts, projecting combat power far beyond the reach of ground forces. Beyond recounting key battles and campaigns, he explores the strategic lessons learned from the war and their lasting influence on American naval doctrine and Cold War military planning.

A valuable resource for historians, aviation enthusiasts, and students of military strategy, this volume illuminates the crucial role of naval air power in shaping the outcome and legacy of the Korean War.

Following the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1713)—generally known in the Americas as Queen Anne’s War—a dramatic, decade-long wave of sea-robbery plagued the Atlantic rim. Often glamorized as the “Golden Age of Piracy,” that period saw such colorful pirate leaders as Edward “Blackbeard” Teach, Charles Vane, and “Calico Jack” Rackham and his henchwomen Anne Bonney and Mary Read. Outdoing any of these, a Boston-based laborer, Edward Low, left his mark on pirate history as a “monster,” the most vicious and sadistic raider of them all. Low’s reputation, and those of the other pirates of the time, was crafted through newspaper accounts and popular literature, most notably The General History of the Pyrates, first published in 1724. Romanticized as anti-heroes and egalitarians in a monarchical world who had liberated themselves from the constraints of law and society ashore, these marauders came to enjoy an immortality bestowed upon them by generations of historians, novelists, and moviemakers. That persistent gloss masks a more sordid reality.
            In The Notorious Edward Low: Pursuing the Last Great Villain of Piracy’s Golden Age, historian Len Travers reexamines this critical period through the career of Low, a complicated pirate leader, and his nemesis, Peter Solgard, captain of the Royal Navy warship HMS Greyhound. By the time Solgard, aboard Greyhound, was tracking Low in 1723, the era’s other notable pirates were gone—dead, captured, or disappeared. Drawing on previously unpublished Admiralty records and consulting both contemporary and modern chroniclers, Travers directs readers to much powerful testimony minimized in or excluded from histories of piracy’s “Golden Age,” leveling a critical eye at familiar sources too long accepted at face value. Travers demonstrates that, feared as they certainly were, pirates were largely ordinary seamen trapped in desperate circumstances who, in the end, had little to show for their efforts. Contrary to popular portrayals, for pirates the second decade of the eighteenth century was a time of radically diminishing returns, scant treasure, buried or otherwise, and increasingly successful suppression by state authorities. One by one, safe havens shut out the sea-rovers, who with their depredations in America quickly squandered the sympathy and support they had once enjoyed among common folk. The Notorious Edward Low puts individual actors, from colonial governors to captains to common seamen, at center stage, and reveals how British authorities used new anti-piracy laws to reclaim a measure of authority over their fractious North American colonies—a compelling  and meaningful story with its own brand of true-life swashbuckling on the high seas.

WINNER OF THE LYMAN BOOK AWARD FOR MARITIME AND NAVAL SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND ENVIRONMENT

Argues that the US Navy’s commitment to high-steam propulsion for its World War II fleet was a tactical, technological, and bureaucratic failure

In Too Far on a Whim, Tyler A. Pitrof presents a high-spirited revision of the US Navy’s commitment to high-steam propulsion systems, the mainstay of its World War II fleets. Pitrof’s research persuasively demonstrates that in its war against the Imperial Japanese Navy, the US Navy succeeded despite its high-steam propulsion systems rather than because of them.

War with an aggressive Japan and a resurgent Germany loomed in the dark days of the late 1930s. Rear Admiral Harold G. Bowen Sr., head of the US Navy’s Bureau of Engineering, advanced a radical vision: a new fleet based on high-steam propulsion, a novel technology that promised high speeds with smaller engines and better fuel efficiency. High-steam engines had drawbacks—smaller operational ranges and maintenance issues. Nevertheless, trusting its engineers to resolve these issues, the US Navy put high-steam propulsion at the heart of its warship design from 1938 to 1945.

The official record of high-steam technology’s subsequent performance has relied heavily on Bowen’s own memoir, in which he painted high-steam innovation in heroic colors. Pitrof’s empirical review of primary sources such as ship’s maintenance records, however, illuminates the opposite—that the heroism lay in the ability of American seamen to improvise solutions to keep these difficult engines running.

Pitrof artfully explains engineering concepts in layman’s terms and provides an account that extends far beyond technology and into matters of naval hierarchies and bureaucracy, strategic theory, and ego. He offers a cautionary tale—as relevant to any endeavor as it is to military undertakings—about how failures arise when technical experts lack managers who understand their work. Admiral Bowen wielded excessive power because no one else in the US Navy knew enough to countermand him.

Compulsively readable, Too Far on a Whim is a landmark for those interested in naval history and technology but also for readers interested in the interplay between innovation, decision-making, and engineering.
 

A groundbreaking study of commerce, conflict, and survival in colonial Spanish Florida.

Trade and Privateering examines the illegal yet highly profitable and mutually beneficial trade between Spanish Florida and the English colonies on the eastern seaboard in the mid-18th century. In St. Augustine, the arrival of subsidies from Spain was erratic, causing shortages of food and supplies, so authorities ignored the restrictions on trade with foreign colonies and welcomed British goods. Likewise, the British colonists sought Spanish products from Florida, especially oranges.
But when England and Spain became declared enemies in the War of Jenkins’ Ear and the French and Indian Wars, this tacit trade arrangement was threatened, and the result was a rise of privateering in the region. Rather than do without Spanish goods, the English began to attack and capture Spanish vessels with their cargoes at sea. Likewise, the Spaniards resorted to privateering as a means of steadily supplying the Florida colony. Harman concludes that, both willingly and unwillingly, the English colonies helped their Spanish neighbor to sustain its position in the Southeast.
 

In the eighties, the Royal Netherlands Navy acquired 15 minehunters of the Alkmaar-class. They were deployed worldwide in conflicts (the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Libyan Sea). In all European waters they exercised and cleared historical ordnance. HNLMS Haarlem represents the rich history of the tripartite minehunters of the Royal Netherlands Navy.

The primary role of the Type 42 destroyers was providing air defense for the fleet. With their long-range sensors, the ships could also act as radar pickets, sailing ahead of a task group. HMS Southampton was the eighth ship originally destined to be a 16-ship class – two of these ships have been exported to Argentina. The type 42 comprised eight Batch 1 vessels, four Batch 2 and four Batch 3 Stretched Type 42.

After World War II, the Royal Netherlands Navy ordered new ships to counter the growing threat coming from the Soviet submarines. These ships were classified as ASW destroyers (onderzeebootjagers), but close to contemporary destroyers in terms of specifications. The national industry designed and constructed two classes of these ships. Drenthe was of the more capable Type 47B series.