The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for biographies .(June 2022) |
Angus Konstam | |
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Born | Aberdeen, Scotland | 2 January 1960
Occupation | Writer, historian |
Genre | Popular history |
Subject | Naval history, maritime history, historical atlas, piracy, Blackbeard |
Website | |
www |
Angus Konstam (born 2 January 1960) is a Scottish writer of popular history. Born in Aberdeen, Scotland and raised on the Orkney Islands, he has written more than a hundred books on maritime history, naval history, historical atlases, with a special focus on the history of piracy. [1]
Although born in Aberdeen, Scotland, he was raised in the Orkney Islands. [2] [3] [4] In 1978, after leaving Kirkwall Grammar School at the age of 18 he left to join the Royal Navy. [2] [3] After initial officer training at the Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, and undergoing further naval training at sea, he went on to study history at Aberdeen University. [2] [5] During this time he was attached to the Aberdeen University Royal Naval Unit, and its tender, HMS Thornham. After receiving an MA degree, he returned to active service with the Royal Navy, during which time he visited many places that would later be written about in his books, including the Caribbean. [2] He also gained useful knowledge of military service, customs, seamanship and navigation during this time. [2] After leaving the service in 1983 he studied for a master's degree at the University of St Andrews. [2] [3] [5] During this time he explored the new field of maritime archaeology and wrote his thesis on early naval artillery. [2] Two decades later this formed the basis for Sovereigns of the Sea, his history of Renaissance warships. [2] [3]
He left the navy in 1983, and the following year he began a Master of Letters in Maritime Studies at the University of St Andrews, a course which combined history with maritime archaeology. [2] After completing his Masters thesis on Renaissance Naval Artillery, he found a job in 1985 as a supervisor on an excavation in the River Thames near the Tower of London, paid for by the Royal Armouries. [2] While he was working in the Royal Armouries, The Tower and the Kremlin decided to swap exhibits – a "Treasures of the Tower" being shown in Moscow while "Treasures of the Kremlin" came to London. [2] At the same time the curators of both museums were encouraged to exchange information, and to examine each other's collections. [2] This ended up with Konstam studying the 18th century Russian military. [2] A mutual colleague introduced him to a historian working for Osprey Publishing, who turned out to want someone to write a book about Peter the Great's Army. [2] The result was two small (15,000-word) books which first appeared in 1993 – the first easily accessible account of the foundation of the Russian army to appear in English. [2] [6]
Konstam moved to Key West, Florida in 1995 and became the Chief Curator in the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Museum. [1] [4] Mel Fisher was a treasure hunter who found the wreck of the Spanish treasure galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha off the Florida Keys. [7] One of his jobs during this time was to create traveling exhibits which toured the United States. [2] During the research for a pirate exhibition, he became increasingly interested in the subject of 18th century piracy. [2] He spent six years in Key West and wrote several more books, there, including The History of Pirates (2002). [3] As he gained more information through his research, he produced Piracy: The Complete History (2008), and then, to reach a wider audience, The World Atlas of Pirates (2009). In 2019 he published The Pirate World, an adaptation of his 2009 work for the same publisher. Konstam also published a biography of the pirate Blackbeard.
In early 2001 he returned to the United Kingdom, and after living in London and then Edinburgh, he returned to Orkney in 2019. He now resides in Herston in South Ronaldsay. [2] [8] Konstam continues to research and write about naval and maritime history. Since 2001 he has written extensively on a number of maritime subjects. He currently has over 120 books in print, [9] Konstam is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society [FrHistS]. He served a three-year term as the Chair of The Society of Authors in Scotland and has also served on the board of Publishing Scotland, as well as on other heritage-related committees. [1] In addition, Konstam has also been a "talking head" on many cable TV and radio shows, and makes frequent appearances at book festivals and history events. [5] [10]
A ship of the line was a type of naval warship constructed during the Age of Sail from the 17th century to the mid-19th century. The ship of the line was designed for the naval tactic known as the line of battle, which involved the two columns of opposing warships manoeuvering to volley fire with the cannons along their broadsides. In conflicts where opposing ships were both able to fire from their broadsides, the faction with more cannons firing – and therefore more firepower – typically had an advantage.
CSS Texas was the third and last Columbia-class casemate ironclad built for the Confederate Navy during the American Civil War. Not begun until 1864 and intended to become part of the James River Squadron, she saw no action before being captured by Union forces while still fitting out. CSS Texas was reputed to have been one of the very best-constructed Confederate ironclads, second only to CSS Mississippi.
An ironclad was a steam-propelled warship protected by steel or iron armor constructed from 1859 to the early 1890s. The ironclad was developed as a result of the vulnerability of wooden warships to explosive or incendiary shells. The first ironclad battleship, Gloire, was launched by the French Navy in November 1859, narrowly preempting the British Royal Navy. However, Britain built the first completely iron-hulled warships.
Pre-dreadnought battleships were sea-going battleships built from the mid- to late- 1880s to the early 1900s. Their designs were conceived before the appearance of HMS Dreadnought in 1906 and their classification as "pre-dreadnought" is retrospectively applied. In their day, they were simply known as "battleships" or else more rank-specific terms such as "first-class battleship" and so forth. The pre-dreadnought battleships were the pre-eminent warships of their time and replaced the ironclad battleships of the 1870s and 1880s.
USS Benton was an ironclad river gunboat in the United States Navy during the American Civil War. She was named for American senator Thomas Hart Benton. Benton was a former center-wheel catamaran snagboat and was converted by James B. Eads, St. Louis, Missouri, in 1861 and commissioned February 24, 1862 as part of the Army's Western Gunboat Flotilla.
The Mississippi River Squadron was the Union brown-water naval squadron that operated on the western rivers during the American Civil War. It was initially created as a part of the Union Army, although it was commanded by naval officers, and was then known as the Western Gunboat Flotilla and sometimes as the Mississippi Flotilla. It received its final designation when it was transferred to the Union Navy at the beginning of October 1862.
USS Neosho, the lead ship of her class, was an ironclad river monitor laid down for the Union Navy in the summer of 1862 during the American Civil War. After completion in mid-1863, the ship spent time patrolling the Mississippi River against Confederate raids and ambushes as part of Rear Admiral David Porter's Mississippi Squadron. She participated in the Red River Campaign in March–May 1864. Neosho resumed her patrols on the Mississippi after the end of the campaign. She supported the Union Army's operations on the Cumberland River and provided fire support during the Battle of Nashville in December 1864. Neosho was decommissioned after the war and remained in reserve until sold in 1873.
Antony Martin Douglas Leslie William Calhoun Preston was an English naval historian and editor, specialising in the area of 19th and 20th-century naval history and warship design.
The casemate ironclad was a type of iron or iron-armored gunboat briefly used in the American Civil War by both the Confederate States Navy and the Union Navy. Unlike a monitor-type ironclad which carried its armament encased in a separate armored gun deck/turret, it exhibited a single casemate structure, or armored citadel, on the main deck housing the entire gun battery. As the guns were carried on the top of the ship yet still fired through fixed gunports, the casemate ironclad is seen as an intermediate stage between the traditional broadside frigate and modern warships.
A timberclad warship is a kind of mid 19th century river gunboat.
The Magenta class consisted of two broadside ironclads built for the French Navy in the early 1860s. They were the only ironclad two-deckers ever built, and the first ironclads to feature a naval ram.
The Fairmile D motor torpedo boat was a type of British motor torpedo boat (MTB) and motor gunboat (MGB), conceived by entrepreneur Noel Macklin of Fairmile Marine and designed by naval architect Bill Holt for the Royal Navy. Nicknamed "Dog Boats", they were designed to be assembled in kit form mass-produced by the Fairmile organisation and assembled at dozens of small boatbuilding yards around Britain, to combat the known advantages of the German E-boats over previous British coastal craft designs. At 115 feet in length, they were bigger than earlier MTB or motor gunboat (MGB) designs but slower, at 30 knots compared to 40 knots.
Coastal Forces was a division of the Royal Navy initially established during World War I, and then again in World War II under the command of Rear-Admiral, Coastal Forces. It remained active until the last minesweepers to wear the "HM Coastal Forces" cap tally were taken out of reserve in 1968. The division received more gallantry awards than any other branch of the Royal Navy during that period.
The Marietta-class monitors were a pair of ironclad river monitors laid down in the summer of 1862 for the United States Navy during the American Civil War. Construction was slow, partially for lack of labor, and the ships were not completed until December 1865, after the war was over. However the navy did not accept them until 1866 and immediately laid them up. They were sold in 1873 without ever having been commissioned.
The Provence-class ironclads consisted of 10 ironclad frigates built for the French Navy during the 1860s. Only one of the sister ships was built with an wrought iron hull; the others were built in wood. By 1865 they were armed with eleven 194-millimeter (7.6 in) guns and played a minor role in the 1870–1871 Franco-Prussian War. The ships began to be disposed of in the early 1880s, although several lingered on in subsidiary roles for another decade before they followed their sisters to the scrap yard.
The French ironclad Flandre was one of ten Provence-class armored frigates built for the French Navy in the 1860s. Commissioned in 1865, she was initially assigned to the Northern Squadron and sometimes served as a flagship. The ironclad played a minor role in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, blockading the North Sea coast of Prussia. Flandre was decommissioned after the war and remained in reserve for the next decade and a half. The ship was disarmed in 1884 and was scrapped three years later.
This is a bibliography of World War II warships. This list aims to include historical sources and literature related to individual warships of World War II. This article forms a part of the larger bibliography of World War II.
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