Very historically correct and factual
My search for information was to document the history of gunpowder throughout the Civil War. Exactly how did the Union and Confederates get their gunpowder? This breakdown begins well before the Civil War, but includes the Civil War in great detail. I found the book to be very historically correct and factual. It ties all of the pieces of the puzzle together, yet explains each piece individually. You have to step back to put the chronological order together because so many actions were taking place at the same time. If you are looking for the history of gunpowder and how it interacted with time, the answers are in this reading.
A Lively and Instructive Read
Jack Kelly outlines the development of gunpowder and its impact on history, giving us a fascinating tour of warfare over the centuries. Always instructive, at times the text veers to the literary, no mean feat in a work of this kind. Tracing its earliest use in China to use in hundreds of years of European wars to the American Revolution and the Civil War, Kelly stitches together historical vignettes that are relevant and interesting. The book is written as a "popular account of gunpowder" and not as a scholarly work, but the author includes a list of a number of sources for those would delve deeper.
Well worth your time and money if you want a deeper insight as to how gunpowder has influenced history.
A bombardier, a nighttime magician
Fun (really!) popular history of gunpowder, which started and ended its career as a propellant for fireworks, and in between fueled wars between men and nations, at land and sea.
One interesting point made by Kelly is that gunpowder was an early human technology that was developed and refined by practitioners, who had an imperfect understanding of how it worked, and not theoreticians, who often had NO understanding of how it worked. And in fact gunpowder as a technology was superseded before science fully caught up with it, so that it is still to some extent an unknown quantity.
I am reminded of Jimmy Buffett's line "A bombardier, a nighttime magician" in reference to a fireworks artisan setting of a show.
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