Approached by Sea:
Early American Maritime History
Mr. McCaughey
Fall 2008
Meeting # 1
September 3, 2008
An Introduction: Maritime
History, Old , “New” and “New/New”
Some definitional openers:
“History” – the study of the past, particularly changes over
time, and of our collective sense of the past. Traditionally divided into
epochs and national units [Medieval European History] or topics [Early Modern
History of Science] [Recent American political history]
Oceans history – the study of the past as it relates to a given oceanic region
(“Indian Ocean history”) – a variant on “global/world history”
Karen
Wigen, Peregrine Horden, Nicholas Purcell, Alison
Games and Matt K. Matsuda., “AHR
Forum: Oceans of History,” American Historical Review, Vol. 111,
No. 3 (June 2006), 758-
780
Marine history – that of the inhabitants of the sea –
whales/sturgeon/cod/piping
plover/great auks/spartina
grass – a variant on natural history
Wigen – “For all its vibrant variety, the research surveyed in this forum rarely peers beneath the waves; sea space within the basin-centered genre comes across as essentially a two-dimensional (and practically friction-free) surface for the coming and going of ships. Yet as headlines remind us daily, whole ecosystems lie beneath that surface. A fuller engagement with marine biology may one day allow the whales and otters and cod that lured ships out onto the seas in the first place to take their rightful place in maritime historical studies.”
W. Jeffrey Bolster, “Putting
the Ocean in Atlantic History: Maritime Communities and
Marine Ecology in the
Vol. 113, No. 1 (February 2008),
19-47.
Maritime – the study of human interactions with the sea, as
a medium of transportation/commerce, as a military arena, as a contested area
of national ownership, as a source of bounty (fish, oil), as a recreational
site; as a realm of the artistic imagination, of recreation/sport
Still very lively field of historical inquiry in
But as until very recently defined among American historians:
Samuel
Eliot Morison, The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1784-1861
(1921)
biography of Christopher Columbus, The
European Discovery of America, editor
of
US Navy in World War II…
Robert G. Albion, The Rise of
Arthur Pierce Middleton,
Colonial Era (1953)
Focus on the oldest families of the oldest regions of the United States – seagoing entrepreneurs of the late 18th/early 19th centuries -- for the edification/entertainment of their grandchildren -- a form of filiopietism; the story of pre-industrial WASP America before WE came over ….
One group of historians that did pursue the story of
The Hancocks
The Browns
The business of whaling
The rise and fall of the American merchant marine
History of technology/invention
Great business records on many aspects of maritime enterprise
Increasingly disconnected with post-war trends in American historiography (not interested much in class/labor relations, race, gender issues;
Of little interest to generation of graduate students after
WW II:
Non-New Englanders
Non-Protestant (or even Xian) à Oscar Handlin
Less interested in social elites than larger social groups/new Americans more
than old ones
Bernard
Bailyn – New England Merchants in the 17th
Century (1955); Massachusetts
Shipping, 1697-1714
(1959)
Director of dissertations on colonial
Revolution (1967)
By 1970s – SEM died in 1976 – maritime history to be avoided
at all costs by any academically ambitious historian
Jesse Lemisch – couldn’t deliver the “inarticulate”
sailor…
Couldn’t get a permanent academic post
Field given over to independent scholars/popular
writers/novelists
Nathaniel Philbrick/Dava Sobel/John
McPhee/Patrick O’Brian/Jonathan Raban
John Rousmaniere
Four rule-proving exceptions of the 1980s- 90s:
Marcus
Redicker, Between the Devil and the
the Anglo-American Maritime World
(1985) -- Uiversity of Pittsburgh/Georgetown
Daniel
Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in
1630-1850 (1994) -- Memorial
University of Newfoundland/UC
W.
Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail
(1997)
Lisa
Norling, Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women
and the Whalefishery (2000)
Rediker and Vickers – class/labor/Marxist-informed
Bolster – race
Norling – gender
Use maritime history materials to engage livelier issues occupying historians….
Four still more recent historiographical uses being found for maritime materials:
Historians of science:
American interest in the deep; oceanographic studies
Joyce
Chaplin, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the
Pursuit of
Genius (2006)
Helen
Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Deep: The Discovery
and the Exploration of the
Environmental historians:
Breakthrough book --
William
Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians,
Colonists, and the Ecology of
England
Persistent links to history of the West, forestry history
Marine environmental history --
Joseph Taylor, III, Making Salmon: An
Environmental History of the Northwest
Fisheries Crisis (1999)
W. Jeffrey Bolster, “Putting
the Ocean in Atlantic History: Maritime Communities and
Marine Ecology in the
Vol. 113, No. 1 (February 2008), 19-47.
Global/world history
History defined in geographical units other than national boundaries/linguistic
groups/regional cultures;
Oceans manage to do such
Karen
Wigin, Peregrine Horden, Nicholas Purcell, Alison
Games and Matt K. Matsuda., “AHR
Forum: Oceans of History,” American Historical Review, Vol. 111,
No. 3 (June 2006), 758-
780 [The Mediterranean/Atlantic/Pacific]
The teaching of history as multi-disciplinary in approach and integrative in its aspirations
History as the capping discipline – into which other disciplines may be
integrated
Beyond anyone’s professional range – necessarily reliant on quickly-to-hand
aids
Pooling our knowledge – raiding our memories of courses past – the web for reliable information
about unfamiliar fields
Enough