Dr. Craig L. Symonds
Professor Emeritus, United States Naval Academy
Chief Historian, USS Monitor Center, The Mariner's Museum

Dr. Craig L. Symonds is Professor Emeritus at the United States Naval Academy from which he retired in 2005. The first person ever to win both the Naval Academy’s “Excellence in Teaching” award (1988) and its “Excellence in Research” award (1998), he also served as History Department chair from 1988 to 1992, and received the Department of the Navy’s Superior Civilian Service medal on three occasions. He served as Professor of Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island (1971-74) and at the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, England (1994-95).

Symonds is the author of eleven books, including prize-winning biographies of Joseph E. Johnston (1992), Patrick Cleburne (1997), and Franklin Buchanan (1999), as well as The American Heritage History of the Battle of Gettysburg (2001). Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles that Shaped American History (2005), won the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Prize for Naval History. His most recent book is Lincoln and His Admirals: Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. Navy, and the Civil War which will be published by Oxford University Press this fall.

He and his wife Marylou live in Annapolis, Maryland. They have one son and one grandson.

Dr. Craig Symonds answers: The VIRGINIA, like all ships of her era, relied
primarily on firing by ricochet. Since calculating the range to an enemy ship was difficult, and since the guns could not be elevated very effectively, ships of the Civil war era mostly fired at a flat trajectory and the shells (or solid shot) skipped across the water toward the target like a stone skipped across the surface of a lake. At Hampton Roads, the USS MONITOR interposed itself between the VIRGINIA and the wooden warship MINNESOTA (which was the VIRGINIA'S real objective) and therefore compelled Jones to fight the MONITOR. When the MONITOR pulled out of the fight briefly to bring more ammunition up from the magazine, the VIRGINIA turned its attention to the MINNESOTA, but the MONITOR returned to interpose itself again between the two ships. The VIRGINIA therefore had no option but to fight the MONITOR.