Ivan Musicant's book provides a class-by-class description of the armored cruisers built by the United States Navy between the late 1880s (the beginning of what Musicant terms "the American naval renaissance") and the abandonment of the concept just two decades later. 

As Musicant explains, armored cruisers (which were defined by the preference for armored protection over speed in their design) were anachronistic and superseded quickly by the advances in naval warfare that spawned the first battlecruisers in 1908. 

For much of that period, armored cruisers were the most powerful oceangoing vessels in the U.S. fleet and key to ideas of American power projection as the United States began to exert its power on the national stage.