U.S.S. Cairo: The Story of a Civil War Gunboat

Peterson, Harold L. (Harold Leslie), 1922-1978Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.2
Word count
55K words
Chapters
6

Tags

English Originals World HistoryMilitary Military TechnologyHistorical ReappraisalMilitary StrategyArchaeological DiscoveryLandmark VisitsMilitary CommandersWarship StoryIllustrated GuideDocumentary NarrativeAmerican Civil War

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.U.S.S. Cairo: The Story of a Civil War Gunboat by Jones and PetersonAuthor: Peterson, Harold L. (Harold Leslie), 1922-1978,Language: English, Class: E456: History: America: Civil War period (1861-1865), Release Date: May 22, 2019

Editor's review

This short book by Harold L. Peterson centers on the Civil War gunboat U.S.S. Cairo, weaving the construction, service, sinking, and later salvage and restoration of an inland armored warship into a concrete, finely grained piece of military history. Its value lies not in grand strategic analysis but in letting readers see Civil War river warfare, shipbuilding technology, and the daily life of sailors through a single vessel. As a public-domain e-book, it is brief and fact-oriented, with technical detail, reading with the plainness of museum exhibit text. It suits as supplementary reading for introductions to Civil War or naval history, and for readers interested in American historic-site preservation or wreck archaeology. Read it as a point of entry: learn the Cairo itself first, then follow it into broader subjects such as the Mississippi River campaigns and the evolution of ironclad technology for a fuller picture.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the sections on the Cairo's construction and service first, then use a map of the Mississippi River campaigns to understand its operational setting.
  2. Jot down ship-structure and weapons terminology as you go, then look up naval technical terms together to avoid interrupting the reading rhythm.
  3. After the chapters on sinking and salvage, search for material on comparable river ironclads for cross-comparison.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6

FAQ

Is this book a complete history of the Civil War? No. It focuses on the individual experience of one river gunboat, the Cairo, and is a thematic military history. The overall course of the war, political background, and major campaigns appear only as context; readers seeking a general framework should supplement it with other works.
How difficult is the English? The original is English historical narrative with fairly plain sentence structures, but it includes ship-construction, ordnance, and combat terminology, placing it at a moderately advanced level. Readers with college-level English reading ability who are willing to look up specialized vocabulary can finish it, and it can also serve as English extensive reading material in history.
Why is one ship's story worth reading? The construction, service, and sinking of a single vessel can concretely present technological conditions, logistics, crew life, and the battlefield environment. The Cairo is also an example of salvage and restoration, through which readers can understand how historic sites become tangible public memory.
Is it suitable for classroom or book-club use? It works well as short supplementary material. It is brief, and discussion questions can be built around river warfare, ironclad technology, or preservation. Because it is highly thematic, however, it is best used alongside chapters from a general Civil War history so that students are not left without overall context.

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About the author

Peterson, Harold L. (Harold Leslie), 1922-1978 Author

Harold L. Peterson (1922–1978) is an author about whom limited public information is available. Owing to the scarcity of reliable sources, his nationality, full educational background, and professional career cannot be clearly established, and only one of his works is held in this collection. Judging from the surviving work, his writing focuses on specific objects and events in American military history. His representative work, U.S.S. Cairo: The Story of a Civil War Gunboat, centers on the Union gunboat Cairo, recounting its construction, service, and sinking during the American Civil War, as well as its later recovery and study. Such subjects generally appeal to readers interested in Civil War history, naval history, and military technology, and the style tends toward factual narrative and detailed documentation rather than broad argument. Given the limited number of works and research materials, he is not widely known among Chinese readers; his value lies mainly in focused accounts of particular historical subjects.