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• The origin of practical shipbuilding methods
• The growth of scientific shipbuilding in Great Britain
• Practical shipbuilding develops in the United States
• The golden era of urban American shipbuilding
• Building iron ships in a wooden shipbuilding culture
• A clash of cultures : the failure of theory in a practical shipbuilding world
• An American naval renaissance and the introduction of theoretical ship design to the United States
• The new American style of shipbuilding
• Conclusion: building an American ship in the twentieth century.

Throughout the 19th century, the shipbuilding industry in America was both art and craft, one based on tradition, instinct, hand tools, and handmade ship models. Even as mechanization was introduced, the trade supported a system of apprenticeship, master builders, and family dynasties, and aesthetics remained the basis for design. Spanning the transition from wood to iron shipbuilding in America, Thiesen's history tells how practical and nontheoretical methods of shipbuilding began to be discarded by the 1880s in favor of technical and scientific methods. Perceiving that British warships were superior to its own, the United States Navy set out to adopt British design principles and methods. American shipbuilders wanted only to build better warships, but embracing British practices exposed them to new methods and technologies that aided in the transformation of American shipbuilding into an engineering-based industry. American shipbuilders soon improvised ways to turn U.S. shipyards into state-of-the-art facilities and, by the early 20th century, they forged ahead of the British in construction and production methods. The history of shipbuilding in America is a story of culture dictating technology. Thiesen describes the trans-Atlantic exchange of technical information that took place during this era and the role of the U.S. Navy in that transfer. He also profiles the lives of individual shipbuilders. Their stories will inspire enthusiasts of ships, shipbuilding, and shipbuilding technology, as well as historians and students of maritime history and the history of technology.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Among the most popular and ubiquitous sculptures in nineteenth-century America were the ship's figurehead and the cigar store Indian. The vast majority of these engaging human figures were created by shipcarvers - highly skilled artists celebrated for their masterful figureheads but who collectively made tens of thousands of shop figures as well, from fanciful representations of American Indians to firemen, baseball players, and fashionable women. Shaped by nineteenth-century Anglo-American values, this artwork reflects the tenor of the times, including racial and gender stereotyping, America's emerging popular culture, and the birth of modern advertising techniques. The Shipcarvers' Art is the first book to assess the artistry and history of these two closely related genres in a single volume. Richly illustrated and elegantly written, it reveals the intertwining of art, commerce, and shipcarving in nineteenth-century America. On March 22, 1856, for example, only four months after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem Hiawatha was first published, the clipper Minehaha was launched at an East Boston shipyard. Its figurehead depicted a renowned English actress in her role as Hiawatha's wife, Minehaha. Central to the festivities surrounding the event were poet, actress, and shipbuilder - and a fictional image of the Native American. Ralph Sessions not only highlights the work of shipcarvers throughout the Eastern United States and Canada but also presents new information on carving workshops in New York City, America's key shipbuilding center from around 1820 until after the Civil War. Just as they were vanishing from the bows of ships and city streets around the turn of the twentieth century, figureheads and shop figures began to experience renewed interest as museum pieces and collector's items. Representing a milestone in scholarship on the subject, The Shipcarvers' Art magnificently brings them alive once more for art lovers of the twenty-first century.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Bibliography (v. 6, p. 3987-3994).--Index of vessels; a register of 13,278 names, compiled by B.K. Reed and E.F. Hunt.

• The colonial period
• Naval craft
• Privateers and slavers
• Revenue cutters
• The American schooner
• Merchant craft
• Sailing yachts

• The first hundred years
• A beginning, 1881-82
• Politics versus progress, 1882-83
• Incubation, 1883-85
• Some movement, 1885-89
• A turning point, 1889-93
• Reasonable progress, 1893-97
• War and imperialism, 1897-99
• Reorganization and growth, 1899-1901
• An offensive Navy, 1902-5
• Power projected, 1905-9
• Steady as she goes, 1909-13
• Neutrality, 1913-15
• Second to none, 1915-21.

Congress Buys a Navy offers a new look at the nexus of U.S. politics, economics, and the funding and creation of what is thought of as the"modern" U.S. Navy. Filling in significant gaps in prior economic histories of theera, Paul Pedisich analyzes the role played by nine presidencies and cabinets, sixteen Navy secretaries, and countless U.S. congressmen whose work andactions shaped and funded our forces at sea. Surveying the development of the new steel Navy from 1881 to 1921, Pedisich's narrative begins with James Garfield's appointment of William Huntas Secretary of the Navy and the formation of the forty-seventh Congress inMarch 1881, and continues on to the reduction of the naval forces by theWashington Naval Treaty of 1921. While the main acts in U.S. political history often privilege the actions of thePresident and his cabinet, the author brings to light the individual rationales, voting blocs, agendas, and political intrigue that drove this process of makinga modern Navy.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• "A Highly Specialized Art" The Decline and Recovery of Interwar Shipbuilding
• "An Unending Effort to Satisfy the Needs for High Speed and Great Strength" Warship Design, Welding, and Marine Engineering between the Wars
• "Superior to the Combined Strength of Our Enemies" Naval Strategy, Shipbuilding Programs, and Navy Department Reforms, 1940-
• "We Can Build Anything" Wartime Navy Yards
• "The Government Pays for Everything in There" Private Builders and Contractor-Operated Yards
• Conclusion Warship Building, Batch Production, and the U.S. Industrial Economy

Warship Builders is the first scholarly study of the U.S. naval shipbuilding industry from the early 1920s to the end of World War II, when American shipyards produced the world's largest fleet that helped defeat the Axis powers in all corners of the globe. A colossal endeavor that absorbed billions and employed virtual armies of skilled workers, naval construction mobilized the nation's leading industrial enterprises in the shipbuilding, engineering, and steel industries to deliver warships whose technical complexity dwarfed that of any other weapons platform. Based on systematic comparisons with British, Japanese, and German naval construction, Thomas Heinrich pinpoints the distinct features of American shipbuilding methods, technology development, and management practices that enabled U.S. yards to vastly outproduce their foreign counterparts. Throughout the book, comparative analyses reveal differences and similarities in American, British, Japanese, and German naval construction. Heinrich shows that U.S. and German shipyards introduced electric arc welding and prefabrication methods to a far greater extent than their British and Japanese counterparts between the wars, laying the groundwork for their impressive production records in World War II. While the American and Japanese navies relied heavily on government-owned navy yards, the British and German navies had most of their combatants built in corporately-owned yards, contradicting the widespread notion that only U.S. industrial mobilization depended on private enterprise. Lastly, the U.S. government's investments into shipbuilding facilities in both private and government-owned shipyards dwarfed the sums British, Japanese, and German counterparts expended. This enabled American builders to deliver a vast fleet that played a pivotal role in global naval combat.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)