The American Civil War produced some of the strangest ship designs I've ever seen. Among the most odd were the river gunboats known collectively as "Pook's Turtles". These vessels saw combat all up and down the Mississippi River and many of her tributaries and were a vital component to the Union victory in the west. Let's have a closer look at these turtles and their wartime careers. Eads & Pook When the war broke out and the Union unveiled its Anaconda plan to surround and s

When the American Civil War began in 1861, the US Navy was charged with executing the famous Anaconda Plan, which aimed to strangle the Confederacy by securing all the waterways and coastlines from rebel shipping. At the time, the navy was rather ill-equipped to complete this mission, but a crash program to convert civilian steamers into gunboats started to make up the numbers of ships, boats, and steamers required for the task. On the Mississippi River, the federal governmen

This 19 June 2021 marks the long overdue first officially recognized Juneteenth. This holiday marks the end of slavery in the United States and has been celebrated every 19 June by African American communities since 1866. Now, finally, this historic moment is now broadly recognized at the federal level and will be officially celebrated in the United States for the first time today. We each should mark this and every Juneteenth by remembering those that were held in bondage an

Admittedly, when I started working on Ironclads all I thought about were the coastal ironclads like USS Monitor and CSS Virginia. Therefore, I saw this project as a small series of dueling ironclads, maybe 10 ships in total. I had barely scratched the surface when I discovered how wrongly I had interpreted the naval battles of the American Civil War. While the Union "blue water" fleet kept the rebel ports closed, the riverine "brown water" navy fought long and bloody fight fo