Cushing: Civil War Seal (Brassey's Military Profiles) - Hardcover

Schneller, Robert J., Jr.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1574885065 ISBN 13: 9781574885064

Publisher: Potomac Books Inc, 2003

Synopsis

Dismissed from the U.S. Naval Academy in early 1861, William Barker Cushing nonetheless emerged from the Civil War as one of the Navy’s greatest heroes. Cushing transformed his reputation from a rabblerouser into a living legend, because he embodied the special qualities that the Navy demands of the men in whom it entrusts its most hazardous and secret tasks: a readiness to volunteer for dangerous assignments, an unflagging devotion to duty, and more than a fair share of good fortune. As Robert J. Schneller observes, "He was patriotic, aggressive, tough, and recklessly bold." Before embarking on his most daring mission-his celebrated destruction of the Confederate ironclad Albemarle-he bragged that he would "come out victorious or ‘toes up.’" By the end of the war he had amassed four commendations from the Navy Department and the thanks of Congress and President Lincoln. "All this for a man," Schneller writes, "who was only twenty-two years old when Lee surrendered at Appomattox." Employing his customary readable and entertaining style, Schneller focuses on Cushing’s naval career and those aspects of his personality that affected it.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Military Profiles are essential treatments of the lives of significant historical figures. Each book includes the details that one finds in a full-length biography and addresses a theme that explains which aspects of a subject's character, background, or behaviour makes him or her worthy of our attention today.

About the Author:

Robert J. Schneller., Ph.D., is a historian in the Contemporary History Branch of the U.S. Naval Historical Center. Schneller’s first book, A Quest for Glory: A Biography of Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren. He received the 1996 John Lyman Book Award in Biography from the North American Society for Oceanic History. He also wrote (with Edward J. Marolda) Shield and Sword: The United States Navy and the Persian Gulf War, which received the prestigious Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Naval History Prize from the Navy League of the United States. Schneller’s other books include an edition of John W. Grattan’s Civil War memoir, Under the Blue Pennant, Or Notes of a Naval Officer, 1863–1865, and Farragut: America's First Admiral (Brassey’s, Inc., 2002), the initial volume in Brassey’s Military Profiles series. He lives in Lake Ridge, Virginia.

About this edition

• Publisher: Potomac Books Inc
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1574885065
• ISBN 13: 9781574885064
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 128