Paine, "Grace Notes on the Future of Maritime History"

Argonauta ~ Winter ~ 2013 8 Grace Notes on the Future of Maritime History by Lincoln Paine Even without the threat of the Mayan apocalypse, which is upon me as I write, or whatever cosmic cataclysm looms ahead as you read this, anticipating the coming needs of maritime history seems a fraught exercise. It is difficult enough to make sense of the past, about which we know at least something, without having to consider the future, about which we know at most nothing. Whenever the question of “what’s next” presents itself, I retreat to the comforting paraphrase of Roche Boyle’s celebrated Irish bull, “Why should we do anything for posterity? What has posterity ever done do for us?” Let the future improvise. Nonetheless, while I am reluctant to suggest anything so bold as a plan per se, I cheerfully heed Maurice Smith’s advice in Argonauta that “planning for a long‐term healthy future involves all of us.” Riffing on a trio of essays published in Coriolis in 2011, in the same issue Isabel Campbell and Colleen McKee ask the provocative question, “Is maritime history best reserved for academics, or is the participation of those who wish to promote particular policies an essential and desirable contribution?” Meditating on what might or should happen next usually engages us in the realm of ideas, historiography, and intellectual focus, but we happen to live in an age that frequently cannot distinguish between tools and what we make with them. Sam McLean’s article, “Social Media,” discusses how the declining effectiveness of “the traditional university‐centric processes for the creation of academic audiences or communities” is forcing academic institutions and allied organizations like the Canadian Nautical Research Society (CNRS) to adapt new technology to reach and enlarge their audiences.1 Taken together, these comments, questions, and observations seem part and parcel of a more general discussion about how maritime historians work. Maritime history is a public enterprise beloved of some academics, occasionally used by policymakers and their lobbyists, and pursued by historians of every kind and calibre from the family genealogist and amateur diver to the historic preservationist, the economic historian, and naval strategist. It is alive and well in books, popular magazines, and peer‐reviewed quarterlies; in blogs, tweets and online forums like Marhst‐L and H‐ Maritime; and in documentaries, YouTube clips, and CD recordings. To answer Campbell and McKee, it cannot be reserved for academics any more than it can be withheld from “those who wish to promote particular policies” for good or 1 Argonauta XXIX:4 (2012): 2–3, 9–18. Argonauta ~ Winter ~ 2013 9 ill. What, then, might be the role of the maritime historian “as a gregarious animal . . . living in flocks” like the CNRS, North American Society for Oceanic History (NASOH), or countless other societies, museums, and other organizations?2 How do we shepherd the vast convoy of stakeholders with their abundance of energy, myriad interests and multiplicity of talents and keep them, if not necessarily on the same course, from running into each other. The sheer variety of people and institutions engaged in the work of maritime history makes the idea of dispensing nostrums for this or that particular ill—or pointing to successes as exemplars to be imitated—unhelpful. A public forum like this must work at the level of generalities such as Josh Smith invokes in “Far Beyond Jack Tars.” Smith maintains that one of the problems bedevilling—or perhaps enriching—the pursuit of maritime history at the university level is the schism between “traditionalists” and “utilitarians.” This distinction applies beyond the academy, too, which is not surprising given that most people’s appetite for maritime history is whetted—and sated—outside the classroom: in museums; through professional and personal experience; by art and music; by books, including literary and historical fiction, memoirs, biographies, journalism, and history; and, increasingly, via the Internet. Smith’s differentiation between “traditionalists” and “utilitarians” seems to refine, if not narrow, a century‐old debate about whether history is “a ‘science’ for specialists” or whether it should be seen as a “‘literature’ for the common reader of books,” as G. M. Trevelyan wrote in 1913.3 Trevelyan’s greatest concern was not whether people took a more or less scientific approach to their research, but how they presented their findings—how they wrote history, whose “only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except insofar as it educates themselves.”4 Maritime historians, whether teachers, curators, or writers, whether they consider themselves utilitarians or traditionalists, must be doubly aware of the need to fulfill this educative function. In academia and museums alike, maritime history is treated more often than not from a scientific—or at least social science—perspective, and there is a disproportionate emphasis on the technology of the ship, the economics of sea trade, and naval warfare and the associated branches of military science. To a 2 John Ruskin, The Harbours of England (London, 1856), 17. G. M. Trevelyan, “Clio, a Muse,” in Clio, a Muse, and Other Essays Literary and Pedestrian (London: Longmans, Green, 1913), 2. Whether history should be regarded as falling within the humanities or social sciences was vigorously debated on H‐World in December 2012. As to whether the hard sciences want for writers of humanity and literary style, authors as diverse as physicist Richard Feynman, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, and neurologist Oliver Sacks are vivid proof that they do not—and of these only Sacks has the benefit of being able to put people at the centre of his narrative. 4 Trevelyan, “Clio,” 4. 3 great degree this is a function of our technophiliac age, with its unprecedented access to data and the development of ways to play with it, a point hinted at in McLean’s article on the use of social media, which is subtitled “Opportunities for New Conversations.” His points are sound, but we must remind ourselves that they address the infrastructure of communication and not what is communicated. The academy has been through media revolutions before: scroll to book; manuscript to printed page; post office to telephone and fax; written to recorded word; and still Argonauta ~ Winter ~ 2013 10 to moving image. Information technology offers as many advantages to historians as it does to everyone else, but it yields a difference in degree not in kind. To be fair, McLean does not claim otherwise, but a good deal of recent writing on maritime history relies on an almost uncritical massaging and presentation of quantifiable data. I mean uncritical not in the sense that the authors exhibit poor scholarship, rather that in embracing the facts they have let go of the people responsible for the facts and without whom history has all the narrative magic of a countinghouse ledger. “Events should be both written and read with intellectual passion. Truth itself will be the gainer, for those by whom history was enacted were in their day passionate.”5 The historian is the conductor of the symphony of the past, but even with every note in its place, without colour and cadence the audience is lost. Yet some trained historians have been seduced into thinking that technology has transformed the role of the historian. The authors of a 2011 project on crowd‐ sourcing local history at Carleton University were dismayed to report that the technology platform they had chosen for their project seemed “to have reinforced the primacy of the historian,” and that the “digital historian” had failed to bring about “an activist role for grassroots community empowerment.”6 Yet crowd‐ sourcing is old hat for historians as far back as Herodotus, the chief difference being that the crowd didn’t go to him, he went into the crowd, as later historians enter into the crowd of archives, ruins, and other sources. If the Carletonians so thoroughly confused the work of gathering stories and the role of the historian, which is to make sense of those stories to tell new ones—but not, as these researchers sneeringly put it, to “dictat[e] historical narratives from an academic podium”— what is the public to make of us? “Hearing that history was a science,” lamented Trevelyan, the public “left it to the scientists.”7 And for the most part they continue to do so. Whether we are teachers, writers, exhibit designers or 5 Trevelyan, “Clio,” 23. Shawn Graham, Guy Massie, and Nadine Feuerherm, “The Heritage Crowd Project: A Case Study in Crowdsourcing Public History,” in Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki, eds., Writing History in the Digital Age. Forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. Trinity College (CT) web‐book edition, Spring 2012, http://WritingHistory.trincoll.edu. 7 Trevelyan, “Clio,” 47. 6 docents, or family bards, our primary role is to shape facts and as Pygmalion did for Galatea inspire them to life. To do this, to “breed enthusiasm,” requires not only an intellectual grasp of information, but also “human sympathy” and “imaginative powers.”8 In an essay that is in part an homage to Trevelyan, Barbara Tuchman amplifies this point when she writes “Without sympathy and imagination the historian can copy figures from a tax roll forever…. But he will never know or be able to portray the people who paid the taxes.”9 Substitute steam engine, binnacle, or nautical chart —even an entire ship—for the tax roll and you will grasp the problem facing museums. Technology can help us ferret out information and it can help us reach larger and different audiences, but only if those audiences want to be reached. In and of itself it does nothing to make maritime history relevant or to engage the public in the real work of historians, which is to animate the dead. “Every true history must, by its human and vital Argonauta ~ Winter ~ 2013 11 presentation of events, force us to remember that the past was once as real and uncertain as the future.”10 If we take this as our guiding principle we will have done much for ourselves and, without compromising our indifference to it, posterity. *** Argonauta is published by The Canadian Nautical Research Society, www.cnrs‐scrn.org. 8 Trevelyan, “Clio,” 8. Barbara Tuchman, “The Historian as Artist,” in Practicing History: Selected Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), 47. 10 Trevelyan, “Clio,” 16. 9