IRON DAWN

From acclaimed popular historian Richard Snow, who "writes with verve and a keen eye" (New York Times Book Review), the thrilling story of the critical naval battle that not only changed the Civil War but the future of all sea power.

No single sea battle has had more immediate and far-reaching consequences than the one fought in Hampton Roads, Virginia in early March 1862. The Confederacy, with no fleet of its own, took a radical step to combat the Union blockade, building on the hull of a captured Union frigate named the Merrimack an iron fort containing ten heavy guns.

The North got word of the project when it was already well along, and, in panicky desperation, commissioned an eccentric inventor named John Ericsson to build the Monitor, an entirely revolutionary iron warship, and at the time the single most complicated machine ever made. Rushed through to completion in just 100 days, it mounted only two guns, but they were housed in a shot-proof revolving turret. The ship hurried south from Brooklyn (and nearly sank twice on the voyage), only to arrive to find the Merrimack had come out that morning and sunk half the Union fleet, and would be back to finish the job the next day. When she returned, the Monitor was there. She fought the Merrimack to a standstill, and, many believe, saved the Union cause. As soon as word of the fight spread, Great Britain—the foremost sea power of the day—ceased work on all her wooden ships.

A thousand-year-old tradition ended, and the path to the naval future opened.

Richard Snow worked at American Heritage magazine for nearly four decades and was its editor in chief for seventeen years. He is the author of several books, including A Measureless Peril: America in the Fight for the Atlantic: the Longest Battle of World War II, and was made a Guggenheim Fellow for his work on his most recent book, I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford. Snow has served as a consultant for historical motion pictures—among them Glory—and has written for documentaries, including the Burns brothers’ Civil War, and Ric Burns’s award-winning PBS film Coney Island, whose screenplay he wrote. Most recently, he served as a consultant on Ken Burns’s World War II series, The War.