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Herman Melvilles A Utilitarian View Of The Monitor's Fight

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Herman Melville’s “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight” was a part of a collection of poems from the book titled Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, published in 1866. It was the first book of poetry written by Melville. According to authors Geoffrey Sanborn and Samuel Otter, “It is a great anti-war poem, one that in its focus upon warfare as the expression of industrial power could be said to lay the groundwork for an anti-war tradition of poetry in English that would reach a kind of pinnacle in Wilfred Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est (Sanborn and Otter, 2011).” The war had a deep impact on Melville, who witnessed the efficiently of mechanized warfare. Many of today’s practices of the military-industrial complex are confirmed in Melville’s …show more content…

It was a trying period for a young republic which had divided viewpoints of progression and the perpetuity of slavery. During this era, many writers of the Confederacy and Union shared their thoughts and experiences with poetry and novels. Noteworthy poems and books include Macaria by Augusta Jane Evans, James Dabney McCabe's The Aide-de-Camp; a Romance of the War, and The Blue and the Gray by Francis Miles Finch. Although these writings mentioned along with others are significant, no other author wrote a poem as compiling and visionary as that of Herman Melville, an unappreciated during his time. Melville’s motivation for writing “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight” was from his observations of the USS Monitor and its crew. The iron-hulled steamship in its short lifetime, became one of our nation's most prized treasures and changed the evolution of naval warship design (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2016). Beginning in 1860, the speed of weapons development incremented enormously as the Industrial Revolution engendered one technological advance upon …show more content…

Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address. One use of the term MIC refers to any set of relationships between military policy and industrial production (Ball, 2002) Thus, it is evident in the present era of war fighting with United States airpower. The United States dominates modern warfare through air superiority. This has been achieved through advancement in aircraft technology and stealth warfare. Hence, the United States has approximately 13,000 military aircraft that were built in factories. Comparatively, China and Russia, the world's next-largest aerial powers, only have a total of 2,000 to 3,000 military aircraft each (Bender, 2015) that were produced in factories. Next, another point of contention is the desensitization of warfare as a result of

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