Robert J. Schneller – författare

"Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!" With those words, David Glasgow Farragut led a fleet of Union warships into Mobile Bay, where he achieved one of the most celebrated victories in American naval history. What separates the good officer from the great one, writes Robert J. Schneller, Jr., is the courage to make difficult decisions in the heat of combat despite personal fear or the awful realization that some men will have to pay in blood.Farragut's personal attributes, such as his sharp intelligence and confidence, and his careful preparations, keen situational awareness, and courage to act boldly at decisive moments produced the Union's most important naval victories and resulted in his appointment as the U.S. Navy's first admiral. These qualities also made Farragut the greatest naval officer, Union or Confederate, of the Civil War and, indeed, the most outstanding U.S. naval officer of the nineteenth century.

Though dismissed from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1861, William Barker Cushing soon rejoined the service and transformed himself from a renowned rabble-rouser into a living legend who embodied the special qualities that the Navy demands of those who undertake its most hazardous and secret tasks. By the end of the Civil War, he had amassed four commendations from the Navy Department and earned the thanks of Congress and President Lincoln. Employing his customary readable style, Robert J. Schneller focuses on Cushing's meteoric naval career and those aspects of his personality that affected it. His concise account of this remarkable man reveals some of the most astonishing combat missions of the American Civil War.

During the twentieth century, the U.S. Naval Academy evolved from a racist institution to one that ranked equal opportunity among its fundamental tenets. This transformation was not without its social cost, however, and black midshipmen bore the brunt of it. Blue & Gold and Black is the history of integration of African Americans into the Naval Academy. The book examines how civil rights advocates’ demands for equal opportunity shaped the Naval Academy’s evolution. Author Robert J. Schneller Jr. analyzes how changes in the Academy’s policies and culture affected the lives of black midshipmen, as well as how black midshipmen effected change in the Academy’s policies and culture. Most institutional history is written from the top down, while most social history is written from the bottom up. Based on the documentary record as well as on the memories of hundreds of midshipmen and naval officers, Blue & Gold and Black includes both perspectives. By examining both the institution and the individual, a much more accurate picture emerges of how racial integration occurred at the Naval Academy. Schneller takes a biographical approach to social history. Through written correspondence, responses to questionnaires, memoirs, and oral histories, African American midshipmen recount their experiences in their own words. Rather than setting adrift their humanity and individuality in oceans of statistics, Schneller uses their first-hand recollections to provide insights into the Academy’s culture that cannot be gained from official records. Covering the Jim Crow era, the civil rights movement, and the empowerment of African Americans from the late 1960s through the end of the twentieth century, Blue & Gold and Black traces the transformation of an institution that produces men and women who lead not only the Navy, but also the nation.