Review: Hicks & Kropf, Raising the Hunley (2002)

[truepenny]

Raising the Hunley: The Remarkable History and Recovery of the Lost Confederate Submarine by Brian Hicks

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This book is by the reporters who covered the raising of the Hunley, and let me say first of all that they have done their homework. They have combed through the primary sources and laid out all the contradictions---which are legion: how many times did the Hunley sink before she was lost? 2? 3? 6?---and made their choices about which source to believe, and they have put together a quite readable story. The second part, about the raising of the Hunley, is based on their own reporting, and is likewise careful and in depth (so to speak). And it is not badly written.

I applaud the achievement of the people who raised the Hunley. But I also notice that Raising the Hunley very carefully frames the Civil War as States' Rights and agrarian vs. industrialized economies and does not talk about chattel slavery as a cause of the war at all. And that is both profoundly disingenuous and bad faith history.





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