Hard Aground: The Wreck of the USS Tennessee and the Rise of the US Navy

Hard Aground brings together three intertwined stories documenting the US Navy's strategic and matériel evolution from the end of Civil War through the First World War.



The first story focuses on the reconstruction of the US Navy following the swift and near-total dismantling of the Union Navy infrastructure after the Civil War. Jampoler argues that the federal government discovered that the fleet requested by the navy, and paid for by Congress, was the wrong fleet.



The second story relates t...