We are accustomed to talking about political violence only in the context of targeted assassinations or assassination attempts, reactions to which fall along a spectrum. Extremists seem to relish it. Some say violence is bad but some victims get what they deserve. Others—including people in high office—crudely make fun of the situation. Many condemn political violence in all circumstances and plea for systemic or institutional changes to make it harder and less attractive to engage in, usually with calls for bipartisanship and easing polarization.

In the United States, we tend to think primarily of interpersonal violence, and with good reason: More than 24,000 people were the victims of homicide in 2024, in a population of 342 million.1 (To understand how catastrophically insane this is, in the twenty-seven nations of the European Union—population 452 million—there were fewer than 4,000 intentional homicides.)2

A century ago, the word violence generally referred to physical force, but legal definitions of violence have expanded considerably. Identifying violence as a global public health crisis thirty years ago, the World Health Organization defined it as

The intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation.

The World Health Organization is not the only authority to take such an expansive view. The Federal Bureau of Investigation describes domestic violence as

physical, sexual, emotional, economic, psychological, or technological actions or threats of actions or other patterns of coercive behavior that influence another person within an intimate partner relationship. This includes any behaviors that intimidate, manipulate, humiliate, isolate, frighten, terrorize, coerce, threaten, blame, hurt, injure, or wound someone.

Extrapolating from these definitions, we can distinguish a variety of forms of political violence: interpersonal attacks on politicians (Arizona Representative Gabby Giffords, Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman) and their partners (Mark Hortman, Paul Pelosi), political figures (Charlie Kirk), or ethnic, religious, and other groups (Mother Emanuel AME Church or Tree of Life Synagogue). It can be communal violence against the state (the storming of the Michigan State Capitol or the January 6 attack on the US Congress) or calculated to intimidate the general public (Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia).

To equate political violence uniquely with “politically motivated” actions by individuals or groups against government institutions, their representatives, or civilians is to tell only part of the story. In 1918, sociologist Max Weber defined the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force [that is, violence] within a given territory.”3 There is no question that federal, state, and local governments in the United States deploy physical force to an excessive degree, and they account for nearly 1,500 deaths per year.4

Painful though it is in the 250^th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, Americans also have to reckon with the government’s monopoly on violence beyond its obvious use of physical force. Specifically, we have to call out the politicians, bureaucrats, judges, and justices who in passing, executing, and adjudicating laws actively perpetrate “physical, sexual, emotional, economic, psychological, or technological actions or threats of actions” against people living in the United States.

This enables us to more see the nature of the harms that flow from the government’s abuse of the nation’s institutions and laws, which is itself a form of violence. It also helps to explain why of the nearly 70,000 deaths by murder and suicide in 2024, 70 percent—more than 48,000—were suicides.

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Examples of recent federal government actions that have led to “a high likelihood of…injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation” are too many to enumerate fully, but a small sample should suffice:

• Republicans in Congress funded Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) without meaningful restrictions or oversight.5 Giving almost unbridled authority to the executive, the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to deploy ICE agents to indiscriminately arrest, intimidate, and kill without provocation undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, and full citizens alike in cities across the country.6 Mismanagement of ICE detention centers has led to deaths from physical abuse, withheld medication and inadequate healthcare, and suicide.7

• The Supreme Court’s conservative majority’s Dobbs decision overturned the federal right to abortion and enabled state governments to criminalize abortion and associated forms of healthcare, which has killed scores and caused undue psychological, financial, and other hardships to thousands.8

• Apparently incapable of identifying racist hate speech when they hear it—claims by the president and vice president that Haitians are “eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there”; that non-northern European immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country or come from “shithole countries”—the Supreme Court’s conservative majority stripped temporary protected status from 350,000 people from Haiti and Syria.9

• In the nine months after Congressional Republicans’ passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, more than 4 million people, more than a third of them children, have lost Supplemental Nutrition Association Program (SNAP) benefits.10 This in a country where 18.3 million households—about 46 million people—are classified as food insecure, that is, “uncertain of having or unable to acquire enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food.”11

• In the spring of 2025, the Trump administration abruptly terminated US Agency for International Development humanitarian programs. An in-depth analysis showed that between 2001 and 2021, USAID interventions had prevented roughly 90 million deaths, a third of them children. It is estimated that the loss of USAID programs will result in 14 million excess deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children.12

• Congress has refused to enact, and the Supreme Court has struck down, practical restrictions on gun ownership. As a consequence, there are an estimated 400 to 500 million guns in the hands of about a third of the population.13

• Severe federal and state laws have given the United States the highest rate of incarceration in the world—614 people per 100,000 in 2021, compared with about 140 people per 100,000 worldwide. Thirty percent of women incarcerated worldwide are in United States prisons.14

Members of Congress, the judiciary, and the administration—as well as state and local officials—who vote to enact or otherwise abet these forms of violence are either accomplices or accessories after the fact, and sometimes both.

No government executes flawless legislation, but in these instances and many others, the resulting harms are not the result of poorly written or rushed legislation and unintended consequences. We can document that they have been drafted, enacted, adjudicated, and executed despite widespread, bipartisan public opposition.

We don’t need the authority of the FBI or the World Health Organization to appreciate how utterly dehumanized the United States government has become. But their complementary definitions of violence give us a badly needed frame for the discussions we must have about what the government—specifically the Trump administration and its Republican allies in Congress and on the Supreme Court—is doing to the American people. It would be wrong to say that we have seen nothing like it in our history, but we are in the grips of a nationwide reign of terror unlike anything we’ve seen in the past century.

Against all odds, the body politic has kept its cool in the face of the federal government’s ever-growing hostility. Such restraint is not sustainable in the long term, and one can easily imagine a variety of scenarios that might tip us into a prolonged and bloody clash between government forces and armed citizens.

This is why reframing the national debate around the abuse of power and the government’s blatant and bloody overreach—not just by masked men operating with impunity, but by their Congressional, judicial, and administrative handmaids—is so important.

What is especially strange about the present moment is how utterly oblivious some American politicians are to their complicity in their own victimization, even as threats to members of Congress have risen for four years straight. Just this week, Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Comey Barrett went to Congress seeking funds for increased protection for members of the high court.

In a much-noted bit of testimony, Justice Barrett said, “I didn't expect that performing this service was going to put me in the position of explaining to my ⁠children what a bulletproof vest was.”15 Thanks to the conservative majority’s unwavering commitment to Second Amendment extremists, active shooter drills are now mandatory in the Indiana and Washington-area schools her children have attended.

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Telling the world that her twelve-year-old son doesn’t know what a bulletproof vest will only make him the butt of his classmates’ jokes. More important, it is indicative of how staggeringly out of touch with the lived experience of ordinary Americans the justice is.

At the risk of crossing the line between church and state—many believe the six Catholics who comprise the Supreme Court’s conservative majority have already done that—Justice Barrett would do well to reflect on Matthew 7:2: “the judgements you give are the judgements you will get, and the standard you use will be the standard used for you.”

To repeatedly blame political problems in the United States on vague concepts like polarization or a lack of bipartisanship is to ignore the obvious. Rather than focus on enabling our children to have a brighter future than we did, majorities of the current Congress, administration, and judiciary are rummaging in the filthiest recesses of the American past for examples of how to achieve narrow ideological ends antithetical to the aspirations of the nation’s founders and of the ten generations since who have sought to match them.

If people of and in power fear political violence, they must stop committing political violence. If they don’t, they might find the blood on their hands is their own.

The most surprising thing about the maritime history indigenous of Northern America is the fact that it is so unknown. While the maritime achievements of Native Americans, First People, Alaska Natives, and others who lived here for about 15,000 years before the arrival of Europeans are of profound consequence to the subsequent history of colonial and modern North America, they have so far been of interest to relatively small cadres of archaeologists and ethnologists, and historians who focus on the period from the 1500s to the 1800s. Compounding the problem is the fact that these specialists tend to work in geographic and temporal isolation from each other. Given the painstaking nature of fieldwork, analysis, and archival research, this is perfectly understandable. But the result is that we lack a holistic appreciation of the importance of fishing, migration, and maritime trade to native societies, of how these often facilitated the exploration, exploitation, and settlement of North America by Europeans and others, or of their profound cultural and legal consequences today. Native ideas and practices regarding fishing, hunting, and land and water rights have had a demonstrable impact on the law, not only in the United States and Canada but worldwide, especially with respect to issues of Indigenous sovereignty and environmental stewardship.

As important, this history is fascinating in its own right. Like people all over the world, Indigenous Americans have taken very sophisticated approaches to maritime technology and infrastructure, in the fisheries, and in exploration, migration, trade, and warfare, for many thousands of years, and they have done so across an incredible diversity of environments, from the Bering Strait to Florida’s Gulf Coast, and from California’s Channel Islands to the central Mississippi Valley to Labrador and Greenland. This is evident in many ways, but nowhere more so than in their canoes and kayaks in which they spread across the continent and that have subsequently given rise to a global recreational-industrial complex worth billions of dollars, although it must be said that First Peoples have profited little if at all.

But if this history is all so fascinating, why hasn’t it gotten more attention, and why would this sweeping historical overview be the first of its kind? There are many reasons, but there are two principal causes.

Despite the efforts by growing numbers of maritime historians to show the world otherwise, most people—including most historians—still think of maritime history as having to do with big European ships and their long voyages or high seas naval engagements starting in the early modern period. They ignore almost anything that anyone else was doing on the water apart from ancient Greeks and Vikings. We have made some progress, but cultural norms are hard to shake, and it often feels like we’re paddling against the current.

At least as important is that thanks to a media diet saturated with Westerns—novels, comics, TV shows, and above all movies—most people associate Native Americans with the high plains and near desert conditions. IMDb, the old Internet Movie Database, has a list of more than 1,400 Westerns, and the majority of those filmed on location were shot in Arizona, the Mojave and Great Basin Deserts of California, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming—or places with similarly desiccated landscapes in Spain and Italy.1

Purveyors of popular culture aren’t solely responsible for this distortion of our collective memory. They are simply following the lead of the federal government. In 1830, Congress enacted what is commonly known as the Indian Removal Act, but the full title bears enunciation: “An Act to provide for an exchange of lands with the Indians residing in any of the states or territories, and for their removal west of the river Mississippi.”2 This policy forcibly uprooted people from regions that had been home to some of the largest, most dynamic populations in pre-contact North America—especially the Mississippi Valley, the Great Lakes, and the Southeast—and displaced them to some of the dryest and least agriculturally productive lands on the continent, a vast area that geologist John Wesley Powell called the Arid Region, which begins around longitude 100°W, about halfway across the Great Plains and continues to the Pacific Ocean.3

In caricaturing or celebrating the last years of Native American resistance to White encroachment, popular culture has indiscriminately situated Indigenous people about as far as possible from the inland fresh and coastal salt waters where their ancestors prospered over the course of thousands of years. Movies featuring Indigenous people of the Southeast, the Northwest, or Arctic would give us a far wetter and more accurate impression of the Native American past than is found on the silver screen. This is not special pleading on my part. A more objective assessment can be seen in the fact that of the dozen UNESCO world heritage cultural sites in the continental United States, three are Native American locales adjacent to rivers: the Poverty Point earthworks on the Mississippi flood plain in northeast Louisiana (ca. 1600–1100 bce), Cahokia Mounds in southwestern Illinois on the Mississippi (1050–1200 ce), and eight Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks (100 bce–400 ce) situated on tributaries of the Ohio River in southern Ohio.4

Moreover, Indigenous maritime history is hiding in plain sight. Nearly a dozen state and provincial names come from Indigenous words that reference bodies of water or maritime activities. Connecticut is a Mohegan-Pequot (Algic—Algonquian—language family) word meaning “at the long tidal river,” or perhaps simply “long river.” Michigan comes from the Ojibwe (Algic) mishigami, meaning “large water,” referring to Lake Michigan. Dakota (Siouan) gives us Minnesota, which means either “sky-tinted water” or “cloudy water.” The French adopted the name Mississippi from the Ojibwe people who lived around the headwaters of the “big river,” although they understood that the narrow stream they knew grew to be vastly bigger than it is at its source. Missouri is an Illinois (Algic) word meaning “people with dugout canoes.” The name of Nebraska derives from the Chiwere (Siouan) word meaning “flat water,” which the French translated as Platte River. Ohio is the Seneca (Iroquoian) for “beautiful river.”

Saskatchewan is a Cree (Algic) word meaning “swift running river.” Yukon comes from the Gwich’in (Na-Dene) for “great river” or “white water river.” The origins of the word Manitoba have been debated since the province was named in 1870, some believing it came from either the Cree or Ojibwe meaning “straits of the great spirit (Manitou)” or the Assiniboine (Siouan) meaning “lake of the prairie.” Ontario is the Wyandot (Iroquoian) for “great lake,” and Quebec is an Algonquin (Algic) word meaning “where the water narrows,” or “strait.”5 Far from the image we have from Westerns on the silver screen, for many if not most Indigenous people Northern America was always a water world.

That’s the argument for the book. What about the book itself? There are a few challenges to writing the 15,000-year history of such a vast, sparsely populated area, not the least of which is that for all but the last 500 years there are no written sources and the pictorial record is thin. The so-called historical period begins with European contact, although early accounts were written by people with no training as historians, translators, or natural scientists, and much of what they wrote was based on brief, ill-informed personal observations, second- or third-hand accounts, and muddled translations of what Indigenous people told their interlocutors. When Europeans tried to transcribe Indigenous words, “they did so phonetically but not by phonetic rules. The English syllables they selected to represent Indian sounds…were varied.”6

With the establishment of colonial and later national governments in United States and Canada, mutual misunderstanding gave way to more deliberate efforts to devalue and ignore native learning. Only recently have non-Indigenous people begun to acknowledge, much less rely on, Indigenous memory, though western-trained historians, ethnographers, and archaeologists are frequently astonished by the degree to which oral histories conform to conclusions drawn from more academic methodologies. Yet even Indigenous sources are problematic. Many languages are extinct or nearly so, and as they have disappeared, so have their stories. At the same time, the governments of the United States and Canada recognize more than twelve hundred Native American or First People entities: 574 American Indian tribes and Alaska Native entities (together with more than 60 recognized only by states) and 634 First People “bands” in Canada, many of whose maritime histories have been forgotten or suppressed.

To start at the beginning, then: No written evidence, a sparse archaeological record, different ideas about how the last ice age ended, alternative assumptions about why megafauna like mammoths died out, and conflicting interpretations of linguistic and paleogenetic evidence contribute to the uncertainty about when people first arrived in the Americas. Nonetheless, there is growing consensus around a few basic conjectures, namely that the founding populations of North America originated in northeast Asia and got here at the end of the ice age around 15,000 years ago. At the time, sea levels were 400 feet lower than today, there was no Bering Strait, and northeast Asia, Alaska, and the Yukon comprised a 2,000-mile-wide subcontinent known as Beringia, which extended from the New Siberia Islands south to the Kamchatka Peninsula and southeast across the eastern third of the Bering Sea to the Alaska Peninsula.

The kelp highway hypothesis holds that the first migrants followed the southern fringe of Beringia, perhaps starting in Kamchatka, and lived off the vast, ecologically diverse seaweed forests that sheltered a vast array of marine mammals, shellfish, fish, and birds.7 In North America proper, the way east was initially blocked by ice sheets as much as three to four kilometers thick, so these early migrants continued south until past the ice in the vicinity of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Here, some people probably began turning inland to begin the process of exploring and settling the unpeopled continent, while others continued down the coast, some breaking off to head inland at various points, while others stayed the course as far south as southern Chile.

Evidence for the particulars of this early coastwise migration is rare because coastal sites people might have occupied have long since drowned under rising seas, or because of catastrophic events like the flooding from glacial Lake Missoula, which scraped 200 feet of topsoil from the Scablands of eastern Washington State, perhaps several times.8 As for the people who went east, they almost certainly followed major rivers that carried them to within miles of the Continental Divide, the most promising being the Columbia and Colorado Rivers and their tributaries. East of the Rocky Mountains lies the Mississippi watershed, which offered more or less unimpeded access to the rest of the continent.

A quick note about the latter is that although people reached North America via Arctic Beringia, settlement of the North American Arctic didn’t start until about 5,000 years ago, when bearers of the Arctic Small Tool tradition crossed from Northeast Asia into Alaska. Within about 500 years of their arrival in Alaska, these Paleo-Inuit, or Sivullirmiut, began migrating east and reached Greenland about 2500 bce. They were eventually displaced by bearers of the Thule culture, which emerged in Alaska about two thousand years ago, and spread eastward to Greenland between 900 and 1100. The Thule were followed in turn by the Inuit, who today comprise three distinct groups: Iñupiat in Alaska, Inuit in Canada, Kalaallit in Greenland.

* * * * *

The arrival of people in North America was only the first stage of a millennia-long process that led to the settlement of the Western Hemisphere. The bulk of the book examines the maritime enterprise of various Indigenous people through several interpretive lenses: boatbuilding, fisheries, travel and transportation, maritime infrastructure, and how maritime enterprise affected the evolution of different Indigenous societies.

Boatbuilding examines four disparate traditions: skinboats, including kayaks, umiaks, and bullboats; the most important derivative of the skinboat tradition, the bark canoe; dugouts; and Chumash tomols, the only Indigenous planked boat developed in North America. These disparate vessel types facilitated fishing, trade and transportation, including seasonal migration between winter and summer camps, increased the range within which sedentary communities could hunt and forage, and facilitated raids and warfare.

Indigenous people devised a wide variety of technologies and techniques for the fisheries, from an 11,000-year-old stone fish weir located off Prince of Wales Island in southern Alaska, to wooden fish weirs and fishing platforms erected for catching migratory species like salmon, eels, alewives, and sturgeon.9 The densest complex of wood weirs in North America is found off the Vancouver Island town of Comox in British Columbia, where there are the remains of an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 stakes from two distinct styles of weirs. The older design targeted herring and was in use between the seventh and thirteenth centuries, when the cooler climate of the Little Ice Age led to shifts in fish migration patterns, and weirs intended to catch salmon were introduced.10 Other innovations include the construction of clam gardens (also in the Northwest) and fishponds, and the development of tools and strategies for pelagic fishing for hunting large marine mammals like whales and walrus.11

Because of their size and temperament, hunting walrus required coordinated activity among families or clans, which also imbued walrus with a special spiritual importance. This later carried over to whales, the hunting of which seems to have begun on a significant scale around the Bering Strait as far back as 200 bce. Weighing 45 tons, bowheads required not only a cooperative approach to hunting but also more specialized equipment, including the bone or ivory toggling harpoon head and the whaling float, an inflatable bladder attached by a line to the harpoon and so prevented a whale from diving without exhausting itself and also served as a telltale that hunters could follow along the surface. Both tools were in use across the Bering Sea region at least two thousand years ago, and subsequent waves of Arctic migrants carried them eastward across Canada and into Greenland.12

The development of watercraft and fisheries technologies contributed to the development of mound culture societies, and almost all mound complexes can be mapped against the major rivers of the eastern United States from the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio Rivers and their tributaries, as well as on the eastern side of the Appalachian Mountains and along the Gulf Coast. More than 2,000 mound sites representing tens of thousands of mounds have been discovered across the eastern half of the United States, the overwhelming majority of them located along rivers or on seacoasts. These include the two 11,000-year-Old LSU Campus mounds, the oldest manmade structures anywhere in North or South America, the 3,400-year-old Poverty Point complex in northeast Louisiana, and the largest in North America, the eleventh-century Cahokia complex in southwestern Illinois across the Mississippi from St. Louis, which was once known as “Mound City.”13 Developers levelled all but one of the more than 100 mounds that graced Cahokia’s trans-Mississippi extension in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century led to enormous changes in the maritime cultures of North America, although we have to avoid the tendency to telescope the events of three or four centuries into a sudden collapse. The initial encounters entailed technological borrowing on both sides as indigenous people adopted European sails, sailing vessels, and weaponry and made alliances with Europeans to gain advantages against their neighbors, while Europeans adopted Native American canoes and the river, lake, and portage routes Indigenous people had laid down over millennia to exploit the fur trade, a primary driver of European colonization across central North America. Europeans kidnapped Indigenous people to learn what they could of their home territories, people, and neighbors, and enslaved and exported them to the Caribbean to make it easier to seize their land, but some Indigenous people managed to return from Europe with their own insights into the lives of their captors, which they used to their collective or individual advantage.14

Treaties were a longstanding feature of European-Indigenous relations throughout the colonial period, and following US independence, the use of treaties between the federal government and Indigenous tribes were enshrined in the Constitution.15 While Whites certainly leveraged their material advantages, the treaty system was plagued by miscommunication in large measure because the parties had completely different understandings of property. Europeans drew on Roman legal paradigms that clearly delineate the legal status of water bodies as public, private, and state-controlled. Indigenous concepts of marine tenure—which has been described as a “system of informal, relatively closed, communal, shared, joint, collective or even private property”—is completely alien to the European mind, which distinguishes between land and water with all the certainty of the Book of Genesis.16 As a result, access to fresh and saltwater has long been an area of intense contestation between Whites and First Peoples.

While the United States and Canadian governments coerced Indigenous people into ceding their territory, the operative treaties often included provisions that preserved hunting, fishing, and gathering rights, starting with the Big Tree Treaty of 1797 between the United States and the Seneca Nation.17 Sixteen federally recognized tribes retain these rights in the Great Lakes, Upper Mississippi, and Ohio River basins. The retention of native rights to fisheries has been most visible on the West Coast. There, the intersection of tribal rights, states’ rights, and environmental issues has been thrown into high relief, and issues of identity, boundaries, and access to rivers and the fisheries frequently overlap. Two areas of great discord have been salmon fishing and subsistence whaling. Between 1854 and 1856, the United States concluded the eight so-called Stevens Treaties with tribes and bands in what are now Washington and Oregon. These preserved “the right of taking fish at all usual and accustomed places…and of erecting temporary buildings for curing them.”18 As White settlers acquired title to land abutting these “accustomed places,” they blocked access to the rivers. State courts have often sided with White citizens against Native American claims to a right of access, but federal courts are more disposed to honor the treaties, and between 1905 and 1977, Pacific Northwest tribes litigated no fewer than seven cases before the US Supreme Court.19

Noting that the tribes had reserved the right to fish—as distinct from their being recipients of rights granted by the United States—and to cross private land to do so, in 1905 Justice Joseph McKenna observed that these rights “were not much less necessary to the existence of the Indians than the atmosphere they breathed.”20 In time, the federal courts held that conservation measures had to account for the share of fish available to the tribes at their accustomed places. In particular, this meant ensuring the availability of fish above the mainstem dams on the Columbia and other rivers.21 In the landmark United States v. Washington (1974) decision, District Judge George Boldt enjoined the State of Washington to take its treaty obligations into consideration when negotiating the “time, places and manner of harvest” of offshore salmon with its Canadian partners in the bilateral Pacific Salmon Fisheries Commission.22

While all the Stevens Treaties addressed the right to fish, the Treaty of Neah Bay treaty with the Makahs of Washington State also included the right “of whaling or sealing.”23 This was an ancient hunt that antedated the arrival of Europeans. The Makahs claim a spiritual affinity with whales and seals but also hunt them for subsistence and commercial reasons.24 This blurring of the physical and spiritual—a fuzziness lost on Westerners—was further complicated by the Makah conception of sea space, which was alien to that held by the Americans. For the Americans and British, the Strait of Juan de Fuca was a border between their respective claims in the Oregon Territory and on Vancouver Island. For the Makahs, the strait was both a thoroughfare and an extension of their terrestrial homeland. Certain high-ranking Makahs held proprietary rights to parts of the strait as to “names, songs, dances, games, stories, rituals, and privileges to practice particular occupations, such as whaling,” a notion that flies in the face of American and European understandings of property and territory.25

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The Makah suspended their hunt in the 1920s in acknowledgment of the fact that highly industrialized commercial whaling had hunted Pacific gray whales to the brink of extinction. When they were removed from the list of endangered species, and with a waiver issued by the International Whaling Commission (subsequently reissued roughly every five years), the Makah received permission for the hunt to resume in 1999. Environmental and animal rights groups intervened to block the hunt the next year, and legal wrangling in the federal courts enmeshed prospective Makah whalers for the next quarter century.26 As if these challenges were not enough, the Makah were also challenged by the Quileute Indian Tribe and the Quinault Indian Nation (abetted by the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit), who asserted their own rights, secured under the Treaty of Olympia (another of the Stevens Treaties), to hunt seals and whales, and to do so in waters to which the Makah claimed exclusive access.27

As already noted, the arrival of Europeans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries brought about enormous changes to Indigenous lifeways starting on the East Coast. In addition to those kidnapped and brought to Europe whether for intelligence reasons or as curiosities, Native Americans were among the first enslaved people traded in North America. Some were used locally, while others were thrust into the Atlantic slave trade and sent to Bermuda and the Caribbean, sometimes in exchange for enslaved Africans, and even farther afield, to Spain and North Africa.28 Dispossessed Natives also began signing aboard merchant and naval ships, and so incidentally settled into the vanguard of US expansionism, especially via the whaling trade. While Indigenous mariners from the Pacific Northwest to the Bering Strait and across the top of Canada to Greenland were accomplished whalers of longstanding, those of the East Coast were not. Yet they were familiar with whales and frequently butchered any that stranded on the beach. As white Americans abandoned the sea in favor of more respectable employment ashore, Wampanoags, Pequots, and others took their places, and at least three are known to have risen to command whaleships and in so doing spread the US flag across the Atlantic and Pacific.29

* * * * *

This sketch is far from complete. It ignores the Canadian government’s forced removal of Quebec Inuit to non-existent villages in the Arctic Archipelago in an effort to bolster territorial claims to the region during the Cold War, and the enforced sedentism of Inuit who now inhabit remote communities across Northern Canada and are dependent on annual resupply shipments from the south. I have not discussed the role of Inuit and Chukchi as middlemen on the Bering Strait trade routes that brought furs hunted in western Canada to Siberia and on to Chinese markets before Europeans involved themselves. I have not delved into the trade in walrus ivory between the Dorset and Thule people and Norse settlers in Greenland. Nor does this brief introduction address the impacts of climate change, not only on Indigenous communities in northern Canada, the United States, and Greenland, but on the traditional fisheries that Indigenous people have fought so hard to maintain and rehabilitate.

What is clear is that, far from being a subject of parochial or specialist interest only, the maritime history of Indigenous North America has regional, national, and international relevance. To address only the national concern, the lack of Indigenous perspectives on US and Canadian history is well known, but one of the difficulties is how to craft a narrative that engages with the long timeline, geographic diversity, and cultural complexity of the native past. No single approach will consider all people equally, but looking at Indigenous history through a maritime lens probably offers the most direct way to see how the first people to live there undertook their stewardship of the continent. And an appreciation of that history is essential for a complete understanding of how the United States and Canada came to be as they are.

There is no doubt that US-Israeli attacks have pummeled Iran’s military capabilities.1 Yet for the moment at least, the Iranians seem to hold the upper hand against two of the most battle-tested and well-financed militaries in the world.

This outcome is possible partly because just as might doesn’t make right, it doesn’t make foresight.2 But it’s also the sort of catastrophic strategic failure one would expect from self-obsessed, know-it-alls led by people whose primary motivation in life is staying out of jail.

I can’t pretend to know how Iran’s Republican Guard works, but they are obviously as determined as they are ruthless, and individually they have no problem taking one for the team, odious though their team is. But it is precisely because the Republican Guard has got Donald Trump and his administration on the back foot that Senate Republicans seem to sense an opening in their efforts to fund the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA), while kicking the ICE bucket down the road.

Republicans’ slavish deference to the president since 2016 is as inexplicable as it is shocking and horrific. However much he may have advanced their cultural and economic agendas, many observers find it difficult to fathom why the vast majority of Republican politicians have so casually betrayed their convictions, their constituents, and the Constitution to support him.

They might take a few hits here and there voting against the president, but the Republicans stand a better chance of keeping their Senate majority if they stop prostrating themselves like a yoga class in child’s pose.

The president will put up a bitter fight against any vote to pass funding for TSA, the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), and other non-ICE divisions of the DHS for the simple reason that if Congressional Republicans get a whiff of their own agency and power, who knows where it might lead?

Quockerwodger Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) won’t find his own mettle, but the Republican majority in the House is Ozempic thin. The fact that Thomas Massie (R-KY) is still walking around a free man despite opposing the president on the Trump-Epstein files, foreign wars, and his One Big Billionaires’ Bill may give enough of his colleagues the inspiration they need to vote for the interests of the people who voted for them.

“I say they’re a liar and the truth ain’t in ’em.”

—Ida Huddleston

Anecdotal support for the idea that the political tide may be turning against the president is hardly limited to a few Senators and Representatives standing up to the president to shorten lines at airports. Republicans have been divided since the Never Trump faction emerged in 2016, but there are also fissures in the MAGA bloc over the Trump-Epstein files, the economy, and, now, the Iran fiasco.

On Sunday, Scott McConnell, the founding editor of The American Conservative magazine, and former supporter of the president, publicly advised Vice President J. D. Vance: “Announce your support of 25th amendment transition. Say [Senator] Chris Murphy [D-CT] or similar will be veep. Announce you will NOT be a candidate in 2028. Use your position, access to the media to explain why this is necessary. Don’t resign.”

Call for Trump’s removal. Choose a Democratic vice president. And pledge to step down in 2028. Those are big, public asks from a prominent public commentator.

The expected record turnout for the nationwide No Kings events this coming Saturday, March 28, could also strengthen anyone whose spine needs stiffening.

Opposition to ICE is also assuming unusual forms, most notably in the very public opposition to mass detention centers. This is happening not only in states with Democratic leaders or that voted for Democrats in the last presidential election, but in rural Arkansas, Georgia, and other deeply conservative parts of the country.

Then there’s a recent news report about a mother-daughter team who turned down an anonymous $26 million offer for their Kentucky cattle farm—ten times it’s worth on the open market—so it could be turned into an AI server farm, which has gone viral. (Note: AI is a term of art, but artificial intelligence is neither artificial nor intelligent.)

Citing concerns about losing access to land and water and the ability to grow food, 82-year-old Ida Huddleston dismissed the prospective buyer’s vague promises of jobs and economic prosperity with what could well become a byword of our age: “I say they’re a liar and the truth ain’t in ’em.”

At one point the videographer zooms in on a Gadsden flag flying on the porch. The DONT TREAD ON ME flag with the coiled snake is a Revolutionary War-era symbol of defiance in the face of actual autocracy that the Tea Party movement, far right, and MAGA supporters—they were on prominent display at the January 6 Capitol riot in 2021—have adopted as they rail against what they perceive as big government.

It could be that these farmers purchased the Gadsden flag to symbolize their resistance to anonymous tech bros, but it seems to have been there awhile. A more likely scenario is that the Gadsden flag will come to symbolize resistance to something more insidious and invasive than our constitutional democracy has ever been, and that we are heading into an age of new and interesting alliances.

1

People keep saying Iranian forces have been “decimated,” which literally means reduced by only ten percent. They probably mean something more substantial, like eviscerated (disemboweled), obliterated (erased), or devastated (laid waste).

It isn’t just the Department of Homeland Security’s murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, fresh on the heels of dozens of other government murders or deaths through negligence since last year.

It isn’t just the DHS’s refusal to identify the cold-blooded killers of Alex Pretti or to cooperate with Minnesota and Milwaukee law enforcement in investigating their crimes.

It isn’t just the military’s kidnap of a foreign head of state and his wife, or the US Coast Guard’s abduction of sailors from the streets of Great Britain in brazen violation of a court order and international law.

It isn’t just the arrest of four journalists—all people of color—in a transparent effort to intimidate journalists and undercut the First Amendment generally.

It isn’t just White House officials claiming that the Second Amendment is more limited than even most gun-control activists argue.

It isn’t just the exposure of a secret internal DHS memo encouraging its agents to violate the Fourth Amendment, which they have done on camera, as in the case of US citizen ChongLy Thao.

It isn’t just the government’s refusal to abide by the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees that “No person…shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

It isn’t just the administration’s grotesque “offers” to withdraw DHS from Minnesota and Maine in exchange for those states’ handing over their voter rolls. This violates the Tenth Amendment, which holds that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

It isn’t just the FBI’s raid on the Fulton County election office in Georgia in pursuit of proof of the fantasy that the 2020 election was stolen. Together with efforts to get states’ voter information, the Trump administration seeks to violate the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteeing that “The right of citizens of the United States shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

It’s not just DHS using five-year-children as bait to snatch their parents.

It’s not just Trump’s threats to seize Greenland, an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, because the Kingdom of Norway didn’t give him a Nobel Prize, which is controlled by a non-governmental committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament, according to the terms of the estate of Alfred Nobel, a Swede.

It’s not just the realization that the Trump administration and its supporters delight in the chaos they hope to unleash.

It’s not just the expanding awareness that Trump is seeking to create a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich—or that whatever the Trump administration does…It’s Not Just.

This conflict is still relatively low-grade, and the government holds the monopoly of violence for now. But something has shifted. The national mood is sullen as dry blood.

The ship of state could be righted with the merest effort and awareness on the part of those politicians who all but beg us for our votes.

I tremble with rage to think of the bloodshed members of Congress could have already prevented—to say nothing of the future bloodshed they could forestall—if they didn’t temporize while the lives of so many of us hang in the balance.

The Democratic leadership in Congress is woefully under-prepared for this moment. There are promising successors in the wings if only Schumer, Jeffries, and other Congressional weaklings would step aside for the good of the country.

And of course, there is no Republican leadership in Congress at all, only followers. And that is how we got to this point. This—this chaos and precipitous slide into antidemocracy…. Republicans own this treachery lock, stock, and barrel.

The onset of a second childhood may well explain this otherwise inexplicable impulse to build battleships. The very real danger of such a program is that as weapons of war, battleships are obsolete and have been since World War II. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the US Navy had seventeen battleships, seven fleet aircraft carriers, and one escort carrier. When the war ended less than four years later, there were twenty-three battleships, an increase of 35 percent, but twenty-eight fleet carriers (a four-fold increase) and seventy-one escort carriers. Another twelve carriers had been lost to enemy action.

The battleship USS Missouri firing 16-inch guns off Chongjin, North Korea, in 1950. Color-tinted version of a black & white original official Navy photo #: 80-G-421049.

The last battleship commissioned by the US Navy was the USS Missouri in 1944. Since the war, the Navy has commissioned thirty-two aircraft carriers. These were central to US strategy in the Korean War, Vietnam, the Gulf War, the invasion of landlocked Afghanistan, and the Iraq War. They are also key to the country’s longstanding commitment to ensuring freedom of navigation in East Asia from Japan and South Korea to Taiwan, and much else besides. Eleven carriers are currently in service, one more is fitting out, two are under construction (slated for delivery in 2030 and 2032), and another two are on order for 2034 and 2036.

The long lead times for these ships reflect both their complexity and the diminished capacity of the US shipbuilding industry. Both issues have enormous implications for any new shipbuilding program. If there were any military urgency for other new vessels because of, say, a war with a peer nation like China or Russia, the country’s largest shipyards would be tied up with carriers, submarines, and vanity projects. (The country’s submarine force includes seventy-one submarines that between them carry more than half of the country’s nuclear arsenal. But, if you’re not a fish, subs are no sexier than flattop carriers.)

To put the battleship fantasy into perspective, in slightly more than half a century the US Navy built a total of fifty-nine battleships in twenty-three classes, each of which was developed in response to changes in technology, tactics, and strategy. Published plans for the “Golden Fleet” call for the construction of twenty to twenty-five battleships in a single class—timeline unknown.

Staking one’s reputation on the ability of Navy to develop a new class of warship that fits its strategic priorities is also questionable. The Navy’s record over the last quarter century does not inspire confidence.

The Navy had high hopes for the novel Zumwalt-class of guided missile destroyers, thirty-two of which were planned initially. The design cost for the whole class was put at $9.6 billion, with the per ship construction price put at $3.5 billion for the first, $2.5 billion for the second, and less for the remainder. A penny-pinching Congress ultimately cut the number of ships to only three, by which time the program cost was put at between $22.5 and $24 billion, or $7.5 billion per ship.

At the other end of the size spectrum, the Navy planned to acquire fifty-two Littoral Combat Ships (LCS, which was said to stand for Little Crappy Ship). Cost overruns of more than 300 percent and issues with new and unproven technology led to the Navy’s cutting its order to only thirty-five ships, seven of which have already been retired.

Throughout history, ships have been among the most sophisticated creations of any given society, and this remains true today. The Navy’s newest carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, was laid down in 2009 and commissioned—that is, entered “into active Navy service”—in 2017. Yet problems associated with its untested innovations were such that it wasn’t considered “fully delivered” until September 2022, five years later. If naval architects started today, in all likelihood the lead vessel of a Trump-class battleship—a type of vessel not built since before its nearly eighty-year-old namesake was born—would not deploy until the early 2040s.

USS Defiant, or Deviant? Only time will tell. https://www.goldenfleet.navy.mil/.

Grandstanding with impressive-looking ships is an ancient practice, one reflected in the equally ancient metaphor of the ship of state and its counterpart, the ship of fools. The first instance that jumps to mind is the shipbuilding program of England’s Charles I, whose clangorous political missteps prefigure the president’s. At the start of his reign (1625–49), many people professed shock at the state of England’s navy. Charles was simultaneously eager to assert England’s ancient if fanciful title to the waters around the British Isles. To bring this about, he needed a legal rationale and a fleet equal to the aspiration. As it happens, the contours of international relations were very much in play so the timing was propitious for the former.

In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Portugal and Spain had been in the vanguard of European exploration of the Atlantic. To avoid conflict, they had appealed to the Pope to divide the non-Christian world into Portuguese and Spanish spheres of influence, which he did through a series of papal bulls (edicts). At the end of the 1500s, Northern Europeans began challenging the Iberian monopolies in Asia and the Americas. Things came to a head with the Dutch seizure of a Portuguese ship near modern Singapore. The Dutch East India Company enlisted the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius to make the case for their actions. In his essay Mare Liberum (The Free Sea), which remains a cornerstone of international law, Grotius asserted that “it is lawful for any nation to go to any other and to trade with it,” and that Portuguese claims to an exclusive right of trade on the basis of a papal grant, territorial possessions in the Indies, or custom were groundless.

There were many objections to this view, not only among the Portuguese and Spanish. The most forceful case was laid out by John Selden, whose counterblast to Grotius was Of the Dominion, or, Ownership of the Sea—in Latin, Mare Clausum (The closed sea). First drafted for James I in 1619, its publication was suppressed for diplomatic reasons. Selden concluded that while the limits of “the Sea-Territorie of the British Empire” to the south and east ended at the shores of continental Europe, “in the open and vast Ocean of the North and West, they are to bee placed at the utmost extent of those most spacious Seas, which are possest by the English, Scots, and Irish.” In other words, Britain’s territorial sea spanned 3,500 miles of the Atlantic to North America—including, it is worth noting, to the shores of Greenland and Canada.

To uphold these claims Charles also embarked on a naval shipbuilding program. Funding it was problematic, however, because Charles felt that as king he was not beholden to Parliament, which he dissolved in 1629. Unable to raise money for the fleet through direct taxation payable to the Exchequer, the prerogative of Parliament, he issued writs for “ship money” payable to the navy in kind or cash. This scheme generated more than £800,000 over six years and, money in hand, Charles announced “his princely resolution for the building of a great new ship” with three gundecks.

The Sovereign of the Seas was built for the staggering sum of £65,586. The gilding of the sculptural details alone cost £6,691, roughly the price of a standard-issue, 40-gun frontline ship. But the Sovereign of the Seas was less a strategic necessity than an instrument of propaganda intended to reflect the person of the king at sea. In a pamphlet commissioned by Charles and otherwise devoted to interpreting the “Decorements whiche beautify and adorne her…the carving worke, the figures, and mottoes upon them,” playwright and essayist Thomas Heywood noted that Charles’s responsibility for national honor and security “should bee a great spur and incouragement to all his faithful and loving Subjects to bee liberall and willing Contributaries towards the Ship-money.”

In fact, Charles’s faithful and loving subjects resented the attention lavished on his naval program, and in the building of the Sovereign of the Seas we can see some of the excess and arrogance that led to the English Civil War. Defeated by parliamentary forces, the king was tried and found “guilty of high treason…for which the court doth adjudge that he, the said Charles Stuart, as a tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy to the good people of this nation, shall be put to death by the severing of his head from his body.”

Charles I was hardly unique in his use of ships to burnish his own image. Warships reached their apogee in the public imagination starting in the 1600s, thanks in large part to the pretensions of the monarchs who built and named them—often for themselves (the Sun King Louis XIV’s Soleil Royal), their family (Sweden’s Wasa), or an alter ego like Sovereign of the Seas. But in our time, a host of changes in technology and security concerns have rendered ships of all kinds all but invisible. Though larger and more powerful than ever before, ships fail to excite the public imagination as they did even half a century ago. So, proposals for a class of battleships are unlikely to engender much enthusiasm.

Bucintoro, Roberto Magni Comi Daniela Foto ReD Photographic, “The Bucintoro, the Most Beautiful Ship in the World.” United States Press Agency, http://www.tom.uspa24.com/bericht-23771/the-bucintoro-the-most-beautiful-ship-in-the-world.html.

Yet there is another model for the ship as surrogate that someone with the temerity to claim large bodies of water for his own, a penchant for gold leaf, and a history of serial marriage might find even more appealing than battleships. Starting in the 1170s, the doges of Venice engaged in an elaborate ceremony by which the city-state was spiritually joined to the Adriatic Sea. The sposalizio (“wedding”) took place annually on Ascension Day when the doge—as in duke, not an unofficial government agency—his retainers, members of the clergy, and ambassadors to Venice put out in the splendid state barge Bucintoro. Declaring “We wed thee, Adriatic, as a sign of our true and perpetual dominion,” the doge dropped into the sea a gold ring blessed by the Patriarch of Grado. In this act, Venice proclaimed its mastery over the sea and affirmed its exclusive relationship against other prospective suitors. And it did so for more than 600 years.

Such a gilded wonder could be built much faster than a battleship, and without compromising either national security or the budget. Best of all for nostalgics, it would revive the tradition of presidential yachts. And the One Big Beautiful Boat would eclipse them all.

seventeen battleships: “US Ship Force Levels, 1886-present,” Naval History and Heritage Command, https://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/us-ship-force-levels.html.

seventy-one submarines: “Submarine Force Facts,” Commander, Submarine Force Atlantic, https://www.sublant.usff.navy.mil/About-Us/Submarine-Facts/.

The great temptation in a forum like this is to take up time reciting one list or another of outrages and perhaps go into detail about why they are bad. The Internet is full of people who do exactly this, with the best focusing on their own areas of expertise.1 The one silver lining of the past few years is that it is now possible to get a thorough education in how the law, government, and media work—or at least how they were designed to work. This knowledge will be useful when we get through this. And we know there is another side to this bleak time, even if we don’t know what it looks like or when we’ll get there. Some days are more hopeful than others.

In the meantime, we have work to do and lives to live. For classroom teachers especially, but also museum and historical society curators, work now includes the chilling possibility of being reported for straying from the orthodoxy of the moment, as though we are all hostage to a dangerously politicized version of Simon Says.

As I’ve thought about all this over the past few months, my mind keeps returning to the now familiar words of the marvelous Seamus Heaney’s poem “Doubletake”: “and hope and history rhyme.” By itself, this Janus-faced phrase makes a bold equivalence between an unknowable future and a pockmarked past. Yet hope has its own history, and history can give us grounds for hope, however dimly perceived.

Years ago, a Dutch friend was teaching a world history survey course at a state university. While lecturing about the French Revolution, he mentioned the new republican calendar, with its new months like Thermidor, Fructidor, and all that. At one point, a student said, “You’re making this up, right?” In the telling, his story was one of mild exasperation, in line with Anders Henriksson’s celebrated Wilson Quarterly article, “A History of the Past: Life Reeked With Joy,” captioned “A brief history of Europe as told through the peculiar observations from college students’ papers,” and which begins “History, as we know, is always bias, because human beings have to be studied by other human beings, not by independent observers of another species.”2

What has always struck me about that episode is how it reveals the enormous power that teachers have, and how correspondingly great the responsibility is to not abuse the trust society reposes in teachers both individually and institutionally. Once you’ve noticed that power, you can see immediately how easy it is to abuse. For people in the history business, including people who interpret heritage who may not necessarily have formal training as historians, the responsibility is especially great because, as our anonymous student has it, “human beings have to be studied by other human beings, not by independent observers of another species.”

Or as Pogo said, paraphrasing Oliver Hazard Perry after the battle of Lake Erie, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”3

Historians face a problem that is at once personal and moral, as well as professional and ethical. In the face of the anti-education movement, it is tempting to throw our hands up and walk away from the profession, from our passionate engagement with the past and, through the prism of our students, the future. But for most this is not a realistic option, especially when all the economic and employment indicators are that there are not a lot of alternatives to be had. If you want to remain in the profession but simply want a better situation there is already a stampede for the few places that might be open. In August 2025, the Georgia chapter of the American Association of University Professors surveyed faculty across the American South—the eleven Confederate states plus Kentucky. About 55 percent of respondents said they would not recommend their state as a desirable place to teach, and about a quarter were looking for work in states outside the South.4 The leading source of anxiety is the “broad political climate,” which tops concerns about pay by 6 points.

One way through our crisis—the only way to the other side is through, not around—is by getting back to basics. If you can’t teach what you want to teach or the way you want to teach it, the best alternative is to fall back on first principles. This approach has the triple virtue of being universally applicable, academically honest, and legitimately neutral, or unbiased.

For some, the idea of “back to basics” suggests a reversion to traditional even artisanal ways of doing things: “you start to give your attention to the simplest and most important matters after ignoring them for a while,” as one dictionary has it.5 I especially like the implied equivalence of “simplest” and “most important,” because generally speaking people tend to think that if something is simple, it is inconsequential, and if it is difficult, it is important. Very often the opposite is true. Breathing, or completing a triathlon? Most of us would agree that breathing is both simpler and more consequential than completing a triathlon.

To make this more relevant to the current moment: we hear endlessly about certain behavior or actions not being “normal” and that we aren’t living in “normal” times. Fair enough, but what does normal look like? My normal isn’t the same as your normal, and yours isn’t the same as that of the person next to you.

The easy response is to insist: Well, in normal times, teachers weren’t told what to teach and how to teach it, what books they could read, and what opinions they could have, and the state and federal governments didn’t threaten funding for teachers, their schools, or their students.

Scratch the surface, though, and you find that really isn’t true. We have always lived with systems of education and culture that can seem oppressive, capricious, or fragile, and in which what is normal maybe shouldn’t be. To test such a bold proposition, let’s go back to first principles. We can start by asking some basic questions.

Have teachers always had the right to teach what, where, and how they wanted? Have their students gotten a well-rounded education? Was funding always assured? Are the students even fed and clothed and housed? How are curricula shaped? Is the outsize emphasis on STEM to the detriment of the humanities and the arts warranted? What satanic hold do Texas and California have on our choice of textbooks?

Many of the same questions obtain with respect to higher education. Should more than two-thirds of higher education faculty be contingent? Should national student loan debt total $1.6 trillion spread among more than 42 million people, 99 percent of them under the age of 40? Should athletic coaches be the best-paid members of the faculty?

And there is the awful but perennial question: When did active shooter drills and, god forbid, school shootings become part of the syllabus? The first mass shooting we think of as such was probably the 1966 Texas Tower shooting at the University of Texas in Austin. Popular belief to the contrary, the next mass school shooting took place twenty years before Columbine when the “I don’t like Mondays” student shot and killed two adults and wounded eight students at Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego. A decade later, in 1989, a twenty-four-year-old guy killed five and wounded thirty-two students at a school of the same name in Stockton, California. All of those victims were children of immigrants from Southeast Asia.

If these are the norms people ignore when they say this or that isn’t normal, or when they talk about “in normal times,” they haven’t even set the bar. And the very real danger in that is that many people, especially younger people, have absolutely no interest in returning to the status quo ante. They want a new normal. And who can blame them?

The same logic about the administration of education writ large applies equally to the curriculum. I’m not going to pretend even hypothetically that the interpretation of history shouldn’t account for the experience of people of all kinds. There’s a shorthand for that, but we can set that aside for the moment. In fact, many of us have been told to do just that, which is infuriating.

Nonetheless, there are many productive and fulfilling ways to think about history—and especially maritime history—we have yet to consider. It is in the gaps between the ways we have been thinking about the past and how ideologues think we should teach that we will find opportunities to maintain our commitment to the study of history. Above all, we have to remember that people want to be seen. We have to make them feel part of the community of the past we talk about. Since a sense of invisibility drives so much of the great dissatisfaction we see all around us, as historians we can quite literally manifest our own allies.

At the same time, there are affirmative strategies for parrying thrusts to our work. If you haven’t already it, I urge you to read The Anti-Autocracy Handbook: A Scholars’ Guide to Navigating Democratic Backsliding. Published in June of this year, was written by an international team of academics from Australia, Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and the US. One of its many strengths—in addition to its comparative brevity (only 30 pages)—is its acknowledgment that people have different degrees of vulnerability depending not only on ethnicity, gender, race, and religion, but also on their stage of life and career, their degree of economic security, and where they live.

One thing they urge is that we find community, as we have here this week, and as we do in organizations like the National Maritime Historical Society, Historic Naval Ships Association, and the North American Society for Oceanic History. I would like to say a quick word about NASOH. We have been around for more than half a century and for the past five years we have committed to foregrounding the history of traditionally marginalized historical actors with our Bibliography of Race, Class, Labor, Migration, and Gender in Maritime History. This first appeared in 2020, and we have updated it every year since. Now nearly a hundred pages long, it is a remarkable testament to the variety of maritime historical inquiry beyond the more familiar fare of ship biographies and commercial, port, technological, and naval history, with all of which subjects the bibliography overlaps. It’s available at NASOH.org under NASOH Resources, alongside a host of syllabi for a variety of courses ranging from Sea Power and Modern Warfare to a Senior Research Seminar on Oceans and History and a Maritime History of the Mediterranean.

In addition to collecting and disseminating these resources, NASOH remains committed to promoting excellence in maritime historical scholarship through book, article, and student paper awards, as well as a $2,500 dissertation research fellowship. We have cosigned critiques of anti-educational actions issued by our larger kin like the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, and our governing council is assessing other ways to engage productively and safely with the current moment.

It seems fitting to close with a few more lines, rich in maritime imagery, from Heaney’s “Doubletake”:

History says, Don’t hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.6

I want to thank Cathy Green, president of the National Maritime Historical Society, and David Winkler, chair of the program committee, for their invitation to address the Maritime Heritage Conference, and Sal Mercogliano, who moderated the panel I shared with the fearless Ms Green, who spoke about her work documenting recently exposed eighteenth-century shipwrecks in the Dnieper River near Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, this summer—a maritime history literally under fire.

Empire-building has always comprised two elements, an economic end and an ideological rationale. The latter is subject to variation, but there is always a vein of continuity. The Bush administration’s claim that we had to change the regime in Iraq because of its stock of non-traditional weapons resonates because of our recent experience with terrorism. Likewise, overthrowing a tyranny to make way for a democratic government is consistent with our nation’s self-image as the arsenal of democracy. Both these rationales have something to do with reality, but in ignoring real world complexities, they leave us with false options. The failure to recognize the dual nature of imperial enterprise—the one ideological, the other material—makes it impossible to see our nation’s actions for what they are, or to address the profound perils of a Pax Americana.

Grand though this Latin phrase sounds, it should strike fear in the hearts and minds of Americans, our allies, and the objects of our covetous gaze. Whatever imperial apologists or historical shorthand may say to the contrary, the peace of the Pax Romana and the Pax Britannica were fictions. Peace was enforced by pacification, all but endless warfare in the interest of winning strategic advantage for material gain. A Pax Americana can be no different, and it can only undermine the institutions and high ideals upon which our republic was founded.

The longing to emulate either the Roman or British empire is based on a selective reading of their accomplishments and tactics. It will foster a clearer understanding of American ambition to examine other imperial models as well. The first to consider is surely that of Athens, in whose imperfect and short-lived democracy we like to see our political origins. On closer examination, there is much to be said against it: slaveholding, women without political rights, and a compulsion to worship the state gods, among other things, including its brevity. Athens’ golden age lasted only half a century after her victory over the Persian Empire in 479 BCE.1 In this period the Athenians sowed the seeds of their own destruction by transforming a naval alliance created for collective defense against the Persians into a grasping empire. Athens’ demise resulted not from alien invasion, but because of her erstwhile allies’ hostile reaction to her imperial reach, which culminated in the devastating 27-year-long Peloponnesian War.2

The resulting weakness led to the rise of the kingdom of Macedonia, whose people contemporary Greeks regarded as barbarians.3 In a decade of military campaigns, a young Alexander the Great trailed a thin veneer of Greek culture across a large swath of the Near East as far as the Indus River, but he died on the march, well before he could take steps to organize his rule. His conquests were divided among three of his generals, who embarked on a great arms race to vie for control of the Eastern Mediterranean and its contiguous lands.

At the same time, in the central Mediterranean, Rome was also embarked on an imperial career. We tend to view the accomplishments of the Roman Empire through rose-colored glasses that highlight its military successes, cultural attainments, and the logistical sophistication that spread goods, people, and ideas—Romanitas and later Christianity—across vast territories. It does not discount these achievements to acknowledge that they had a tremendous human cost. Slavery was extensive, wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few, and the people’s baser appetites were sated with liberal doses of panem et circenses—bread and circuses. Most glaring, the price of imperial administration was exorbitant, especially the maintenance of a large, highly trained professional army by whose arms the empire was enlarged and protected.

Rome’s transition from republic to empire occurred under Augustus, who assumed for himself an unprecedented degree of political power. But in its territorial expansion, Rome had been an empire in the modern sense for hundreds of years. In the 1st century BCE, Rome already controlled most of Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and parts of Spain, North Africa. and the Balkans. By the death of Augustus in 14 BCE, these gains had been consolidated: Gaul, Britain, and Egypt (with its invaluable granaries), and vast tracts of Asia Minor and the coastal Near East had been annexed. For several centuries thereafter, the empire was preoccupied variously with the expansion and/or security of its long, heavily fortified borders. In Roman Britain, Hadrian’s Wall stretched from the North Sea to the Irish Sea to protect Romano-British settlements against invasion from Scotland, while a line of forts in the west guarded against incursions from Wales. The empire’s continental border was defined more or less by the Rhine and Danube Rivers, natural boundaries of considerable size that the Romans nonetheless had to reinforce with more than a hundred forts. A further measure of security was achieved by establishing colonies peopled by retired legionnaires as a sort of veterans’ benefit for people whose allegiance was presumably assured.

It is a testament to the inherent instability of the empire that by the 300s, the Pax Romana was being maintained by more than thirty legions. Ultimately, the armies and associated bureaucracy upon which the state relied for its existence proved both unaffordable and unreliable. The level of unrest in the empire varied by place and time, but they included local uprisings (slave revolts and the Jewish revolts of the 60s and 130s CE, for instance), as well as probes by Germanic tribes along the Rhine/Danube line, which culminated in the “barbarian” invasions of the 4th century CE. There was also chronic instability in the East, where security depended largely on the weakness of the Parthian Empire and the willingness of buffer states to submit to Rome.

In addition to their intended role as guardians of the frontier, the armies played a decisive role in domestic politics. In the first century of the Pax Romana, when the lands ringing the Mediterranean were at their most serene, being emperor was at its most dangerous. A large part of the army’s pay derived from booty acquired on campaign, which more or less dictated that it be kept gainfully employed if the soldiery were to be kept in check. Inattention to this fact, combined with other political pressures, often proved fatal. Of the first 12 emperors, five were murdered and two killed themselves in disgrace.

In the United States, there is a comparable problem, not with the patriotic military (hence the cavalier downgrading of veterans’ benefits), but with its self-serving civilian arm—the industries of the military-industrial complex. Their revenues depend on the consumption of an enormous array of weapons, goods, and services, and these industries go to great lengths to make sure their products are in demand. The degree to which military contractors have perverted American politics and foreign policy can be seen in these companies’ strategic establishment of factories and offices in virtually every single Congressional district in the United States, a fact that enables them to exert an incalculable influence on government from the local to the federal level. Against such an entrenched interest, the Son of God would have to campaign on a platform of Pax Christiana rather than of Pax Christi.

In its 19th-century phase, America’s conquest of the lands south and west of the original 13 states towards the Gulf Coast, the Great Lakes, and the Pacific seems reminiscent of the expansion of the Roman Republic, although there was greater technological parity between Rome and her neighbors than between American settlers and Native Americans. The American experience more accurately reflects that of the Russian Empire in its eastward expansion into Siberia and North America from the 16th to the 19th centuries. With exemplary bad timing, the Russians sold Fort Ross, in California, to John Sutter seven years before the gold rush began at Sutter’s Mill in 1849, and then sold Alaska to the United States three decades before the Klondike gold rush. Despite these losses, Russian expansion was spectacular. Even after the break-up of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, Russia remains the largest country in the world. The nation that began with 13 states on the eastern seaboard of North America is the third.

An apt parallel for America’s more recent imperial exertions can be found in those of 15th- and 16th-century Portugal: evangelical, commercial, essentially non-territorial, militarily advanced and often ruthless in the pursuit of its aims. Two forces drove Portuguese expansion. As latter-day crusaders, the Portuguese believed it was their mission to fight Muslims and convert heathens. As merchants, they sought access to the spice trade and to monopolize it at the expense of Indian Ocean merchants (many of whom were Muslim) and in the Mediterranean, where their chief rivals were fellow Christians. In much the same way, the United States seeks to convert to democracy nations and regions where we have a quantifiable economic interest. The war against Saddam Hussein came about not because the people of Iraq suffered under the government, or because the regime’s weaponry posed a clear and present danger to the United States, but because the government controlled vast stocks of oil.

The man credited with kick-starting Portugal’s overseas adventures was Prince Henry, whom a 19th-century British historian dubbed “the Navigator.” A strong advocate of the Church militant, Henry cajoled his brother to embark on a crusade against the Moors. After casting about for a likely target, in 1415 Henry took part in the capture of the Moroccan port of Ceuta, a place of little economic or strategic significance to Portugal. The victory proved a white elephant, for the territory was costly to maintain but impossible to surrender without losing face. A subsequent attack on the more powerful port of Tangier failed, and Henry eventually turned to more commercial pursuits that took his caravels into the archipelagoes of the western Atlantic, especially Madeira, and south along the Guinea coast of West Africa, a source of gold, slaves, and cheap pepper.

The aims and rationale of this 600-year-old European anticipate the strained arguments of the Bush administration. Although crusading was properly an altruistic activity undertaken for spiritual rather than material gain, Henry was unquestionably a merchant prince who had no problem mixing commercial opportunity with the work of the Church militant. Similarly, President Bush’s version of militant democracy serves as an ideological banner around which business interests rally in search of market share. In his denial of the obvious economic rationale for U.S. adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq—but not in Saudi Arabia, which has too much oil, nor in North Korea, which has none—he protests too much. Afghanistan gives access to the gas fields of Central Asia and Iraq has the world’s second largest reserves of oil.4

Rather than admit what the whole world knows, the Bush administration insists that the American invasion of Iraq is not about oil. With some qualification, this is correct: It is not about oil—alone. Any number of opportunists are hiding in the wings, from the administration’s friends and associates at corporations such as Halliburton—whose former chairman is Vice President Dick Cheney, and whose board of directors includes President George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State, George Schultz—and Bechtel—whose board of directors includes George H.W. Bush’s other Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger. Other luminaries who stand to gain enormously include American businessman and hawk Richard Perle, and Saudi arms dealer and businessman Adnan Khashoggi, trusted veteran of the Iran-Contra scandal. There are myriad ways to cash in on rebuilding and rearming Iraq, if you know the right people and have the right access.5

An especially striking parallel between Prince Henry and President Bush is their staunch adherence to outmoded legal concepts to justify their actions. Prince Henry promoted the notion that fighting Muslims was just war as sanctioned by the Church. His insistence on this point disregarded a growing body of ecclesiastical and lay legal writing that maintained that neither popes nor princes had the authority to wage war against non-Christian states simply because they were not Christian.6 With similar ideological fervor, President Bush has argued the need to export democracy to the people of Iraq, even if it means disregarding international law and opinion, or even, as it may transpire, the wishes of the Iraqi people.7

At the end of the 15th century, the Crusader ethos was still alive and well in Portugal, and when Vasco da Gama reached the Indian port of Calicut in 1498, one of his first acts was to drive a wedge between the Hindu rulers and the city’s community of Muslim merchants. So eager were they to find co-religionists with whom they could make common cause against the Muslims that the Portuguese determined that the local Hindus belonged to a previously unknown sect of Christians. This tendency to see things not as they are but as we want them to be is a salient characteristic of Bush’s foreign policy, in which all issues are divided into black and white and democracy is treated like a marketable commodity. The president’s announcement that if you are not with us, you are against us, has a corollary of uncertain value: if you are with us—in this case, against Hussein—you must also be like us, that is, democratic.

This error is not unique to Bush. It was tragically made in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion; when we armed the fundamentalist factions who went on to form the Taliban government and Al Qaeda.8 We are poised to make the same mistake in Iraq, where the anti-Hussein lineup comprises virtually every shade of the political spectrum from Kurdish Communists, to Sunni clerics, to democrats-in-exile whose political credentials and legitimacy are thin. This is not to suggest that no Iraqis believe in democracy, but opposition to Ba’ath Party rule takes many forms, and it is not clear that a secular majority has much chance of winning a clear mandate to form a democratic government, especially if the winner is perceived as an American puppet. Any government that truly represents the fractured will of the Iraqi people will have to make concessions and embrace ideologies that are anathema to the militant democracy espoused by Bush’s own “Republican Guard.”

Once in the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese might have adapted themselves to the laissez-faire patterns of an ancient network of trade that passed goods from East Africa and China and all the lands between. Instead, they seized strategic ports; built and garrisoned fortresses; demanded protection money from Muslim, Hindu, and other merchants; and attempted to monopolize the Indian Ocean spice trade. In so doing, the crown relied upon soldiers who died by the hundreds of disease or in battle, and on viceroys and governors who usually exploited their offices for personal gain. The American empire already emulates this approach with military bases strung like a necklace around the world. The jewels in the western Indian Ocean region include Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Iraq, and Diego Garcia (whose entire population was forcibly removed between 1965 and 1973).9 Together these help shape the patterns of world trade—especially the oil trade—in America’s interest. Those nations dependent on Middle Eastern oil and Central Asian natural gas must tread lightly for fear of antagonizing the United States.

The last empire to consider in this brief comparative survey is that of Great Britain, one of several successors to the Portuguese and by most measures the most successful. At its height, its territories were the most extensive in the world, including Canada, Australia, India, vast tracts of Africa and Asia, and smaller holdings in the Americas, Antarctica, and Europe—Ireland and Gibraltar. The underlying factors for English expansion in the 16th century were essentially practical—a desire to compete for spices and to provide an outlet for their domestic trade, which the Spanish had curtailed. But like the Portuguese before them, the English were animated by a militant ideology, one originally founded on a virulent hostility to Catholicism in general and to Spain and Portugal (by then part of the Spanish empire) in particular.

This ideological foundation quickly took on a life of its own. In the early 1600s, English propagandists decided that in their failure to develop the abundant resources available to them in the European manner, Native Americans had effectively ceded their right to the land. North America was considered “virgin” territory “that hath yet her maidenhead” and which was, therefore, “attractive for Christian suitors.” The attraction was not, however, absolute, and much of the raw labor for the colonies had to be provided by indentured servants, criminals, and religious dissidents from the British Isles, and African slaves. The latter were a staple of the English Atlantic trade for centuries, and when the slave trade was finally abolished in the 19th century, British traffickers in human cargoes simply shifted to the coolie trade—the shipment of Indian and Chinese laborers in conditions that abolitionist Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, described as “almost as heart-rending as any that attended the African slave trade.”10

Despite their differences, abolitionists and slavers alike believed that the world was filled with inferior races. They parted company on the issue of what to do about them. The former argued they could be civilized, the latter that they were good for little more than brute labor. One can sense the tension between these two lines of thought in Rudyard Kipling’s turn-of-the-century ballad in which he urged people to “take up the White Man’s burden … to serve your captives’ need.” By 1899, the British had their empire well in hand (their meddling in the Middle East would have to wait until after World War I) and Kipling was addressing himself to the people of the United States, who had just taken up “the White Man’s burden—The savage wars of peace” in the Philippines, newly won in the Spanish-American War.

If religion and ideology account for the zeal with which the British undertook their expansion, their success must be attributed to their relative commercial sophistication and their essentially pragmatic approach to business. The chartered companies that initiated foreign trade and colonization were run by merchants who were quick to adapt to changed circumstances. Investors in the East India Company fully intended to profit from the spice trade, but when the Dutch established a monopoly in the East Indies and shut them out, the Company withdrew to India. At first, they were all but ignored by the Mughal court, but they persevered, especially in Calcutta. As the Mughal Empire declined (as all empires must), by the end of the 18th century the Company had all but annexed Bengal through the deft use of trade, diplomacy, and arms. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, it exercised either direct or indirect control over most of the lands that now comprise India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. The British government’s involvement in India grew gradually from the mid-17th century, but it was only in 1858 that the government assumed formal control of India.

A crucial reason for the British success in India was the lack of homogeneity in the subcontinent. The East India Company exploited divisions of race, religion, and caste to gain commercial and territorial concessions. Another was the British reliance on trafficking in low-value, high-volume goods within the framework of traditional intra-Asian trade, especially in Indian cotton, lead, silver, and pepper, and Chinese silk, porcelain, and lacquer ware. Profits from these trades were significant, but, as important, such commerce did not justify the imposition of a monopoly and the huge expenses required for its maintenance; such costs ate deeply into the profits of the Portuguese and Dutch spice trades.

The East India Company’s trade remained profitable and balanced until the 1720s, when demand for tea in Britain grew sharply, a development with profound consequences for Britain, China, and indeed much of the world. Starting in the 1720s, tea comprised more than half of the Company’s exports from China, and a century later it accounted for all of them. The government’s keen interest derived from the duty it imposed on tea, which by the 1820s accounted for 10 percent of government revenues. As China was self-sufficient for virtually all its needs and traders had almost nothing they wanted in exchange for tea, Europeans were forced to pay in silver. The British need for silver to pay for the Napoleonic Wars and for the pacification and administration of India at the end of the 1700s forced the Company to search for an alternative to bullion, which they found in the form of opium. So successful was the East India Company’s cultivation of China’s appetite for opium that it stopped carrying silver to China in 1805, and two years later it was actually importing silver from China. (American merchants also shipped Turkish opium to China, to the chagrin of the British and the consternation of the Chinese.)11

The only problem with this trade was that it was completely illegal in China, where the first laws proscribing opium had been enacted in 1729. The effects of opium use were widespread and had both moral and economic effects that the Chinese could ill-afford. Trade in daily goods declined as addicts devoted more and more of their income to the drug. Bullion outflows from China had a direct impact on the treasury, which collected taxes in silver. In response to these growing problems, in 1839 the emperor’s imperial commissioner at Canton seized and burned about 140 tons of opium. In response, the British government dispatched a force of 16 ships and 4,000 soldiers to demand satisfaction. The British victory over the antiquated Chinese forces in what became known as the First Opium War was swift and total. By the Treaty of Nanking, the British secured millions in restitution and forced the Chinese to open additional ports to foreign trade. China lost two more drug wars, and Britain ultimately secured the legalization of the opium trade, which towards the end of the century brought in £10 million a year for the British Raj in India.12

The opening of the treaty ports had a number of unintended consequences, two of which are of particular relevance to the United States. Having observed the overwhelming superiority of British arms against the Chinese, Japan responded promptly to U.S. demands to open its ports to foreigners after several centuries of relative isolation. Thereafter, Japan industrialized rapidly, working especially closely with Britain to develop its naval and merchant fleets. In 1895, Japan overwhelmed the modernized Chinese fleet in the Sino-Japanese War. Ten years later, it destroyed a powerful Russian fleet at the Battle of Tsushima to find itself the dominant naval power in the Pacific. Forty years later, the Japanese met their match at the hands of the United States, whose crushing but slow victory in World War II helped pave the way for American hegemony in the Pacific—half a century after taking up the White Man’s burden there—and dragged it deep into East Asian regional politics.

The Opium Wars may have illustrated China’s technological and cultural decline under the Qing dynasty, but the unequal treaties forced by the British undermined any prospect that China would soon achieve its former stature on the world stage. In fact, the drug-induced malaise fueled by the British certainly contributed to the collapse of the Celestial Kingdom in the 20th century and to the turbulent decades of civil war and oppressive communist rule that followed. A century-and-a-half after Britain’s shocking and awesome victory, China has begun to find its way in the world once again, while Britain’s empire is virtually extinct, a victim of overreach and to a lesser extent its unintended clarity in preaching the virtues of individual rights to the very people it sought to oppress on four continents.13

None of these imperial models is an exact fit for the United States at the start of the 21st century. But even a glance at their salient features offers a grim reminder that, stripped of revisionist hyperbole, empires yield a ghastly human toll. No one can fault the bravery, luck, and sheer force of will characteristic of imperial pioneers of any age. Against these we must weigh their hideous legacy of brutal intimidation, human bondage, and appalling exploitation.

What fruit will the current round of American imperialism in Iraq bear? A few American businesses will reap huge windfalls from rebuilding the country’s infrastructure. As of this writing, the Bush administration has installed a military authority to run the country while it scrambles to install a puppet regime whose interests align with its own.14 This will give the United States control of Iraq’s oil production and revenues, and an unprecedented voice in OPEC.15 Such superficial achievements benefit only a small and shrill minority of powerful interests, however. For the majority of Americans, this and similar imperial ventures will provide no more than an outlet for demonstrations of jingo patriotism and flag-waving xenophobia.

As for the loftier premises deployed to justify our imperial ambition, it takes a chilling indifference to history to believe that people anywhere will swarm to democratic ideals as articulated by an invading army, or that the people of the Middle East, who in their day have shucked off many versions of Western imperialism—Greek and Roman, Portuguese, British and Russian—have any inclination to be subject to a Pax Americana. Three things are certain: Their reluctance will come at a high price. The burden of sustaining the empire will be spread more evenly than the benefits of creating it. And for Americans, the most immediate and gravest risk is to neither people nor property, but to that great preserver of them both, the Constitution.

First published in Clio’s Psyche 10:3 (Dec. 2003): 91–97.

The kitchen’s a playroom and so is the car.
Outside to the left, the playground’s not far.
A beach is a wonder of puppies and sand
and adventures with water not always well-planned.
But if you prefer mountains, she’s in love with the land.

When Elsa’s around, that’s always a plus,
but maybe you’re wondering, “What about us?”
Well, how are you fixed with pencils or clay
or magnets or puzzles or an oversized tray?
To put it quite simply: Do you know how to play?

If clothes are in fashion—and even when not—
Poppy will wear them unless it’s too hot.
She’ll twirl and she’ll curtsy right down to the floor
and if you keep laughing, she’ll do it some more.
Please mind that she doesn’t spin out through the door.

Unless she’s asleep, The Pop! is in motion
as restless as clouds or waves in the ocean.
“World’s busiest human,” her parents still call her,
which was true even when she was quite a bit smaller.
Now that she’s two, she’s got somewhat taller.

How do you keep all that energy flowing,
for even asleep Penelope’s growing?
Quesadillas, kombucha, and bacon to start
prepared all together or served à la carte.
She loves food of all kinds, sweet, savory, and tart.

When dinner is finished, she starts to wind down,
and after a soak with a bubble-bath crown,
she brushes her teeth with a faraway look,
snuggles into her PJs and down with a book
But though she is tired, there’s a bit of a hook...

Listen quite closely—that sound you can hear...?
That clip and that clop mean tomorrow is near!

To engage with marginalized groups and individuals requires that we ask hard questions about the past and take risks to get the answers. While critics wield “woke” as a verbal cudgel to slam the acknowledgement of people whose contributions to the world have been ignored out of simple prejudice, most of us don’t want to sleepwalk through life. This is especially true of historians.

Last month I was honored to announce the winners of the John R. Lyman Book Awards in maritime history at the annual conference of the North American Society for Ocean History (NASOH) in Natchez. In my introductory remarks, I joked that we might find the diversity, equity, and inclusion police after us because eight of the 2024 honorees are women. These included Randy Carol Goguen and Abigail Mullen, both of whom won in the North American Naval History category, African American Mary Hicks, and Li Tana, a Chinese-born Australian scholar of Southeast Asia.1

As potentially offensive to the anti-woke crowd, three of the books treated different aspects of the slave trade: Hicks’s Captive Cosmopolitans, in World Maritime History; Jane Webster’s Materializing the Middle Passage: A Historical Archaeology of British Slave Shipping, 1680–1807, in Maritime and Nautical Archaeology; and Jeff Forret’s The Price They Paid: Slavery, Shipwrecks, and Reparations Before the Civil War, in North American Maritime History. Forret’s book examines not reparations paid to the formerly enslaved (no national government has paid any) but the US government’s two-decade effort to get the British government to compensate American slaveowners whose human “property” had been automatically freed upon landing on British soil.2

In addition, Andrew Lipman’s Squanto: A Native Odyssey considers the upbringing and transatlantic peregrinations of the man credited with saving the Pilgrims but who is usually rendered as a two-dimensional cutout. This is one of many recent scholarly works to have explored the previously overlooked travels of thousands of Native Americans to Europe starting in the fifteenth century. Finally, there was Daniel Macfarlane’s The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History, which assesses maritime and other activities on the smallest and most polluted of the Great Lakes.

To be sure, there were plenty of books to whet the appetite of the most heave-ho traditionalist: on Americans’ determination to navigate the Spanish-controlled Mississippi in the 1790s, the Tripolitan War, the Civil War, an obscure but significant chapter in the development of naval engineering and its consequences for the US Navy in the Pacific theater of World War II, the unheralded naval campaign in the English Channel that lasted from before D-Day until the fall of Le Havre three months later, Aristotle Onassis, one of the most consequential shipping magnates of the twentieth century, and the Cold War in the Western Pacific.

That women swept the North American Naval History category was obvious immediately, but none of the committee members (four women and three men) registered how many women honorees there were overall—nor the number of titles that touched on human enslavement—until after the fact. The reason is that the committee judges the merit of books within, not across, the eight categories in which awards are made.

No one working in maritime history would find anything unusual about such a preponderance of women honorees, although all would agree that the field has traditionally been viewed as a subject about and for men and it has taken time for women to break into the profession. When the idea for NASOH was first floated at a conference at the University of Maine in Orono in 1973, a total of seventy-seven people registered, nine of them women. Six registered as spouses—Mrs. John Lyman and the like—and only three had any academic or professional affiliation. One was an undergrad and another a grad student.3

The sole woman among the twenty presenters was Judith Joye, whose credentials were unusual for anyone at the time. She was not an academic, but worked in underwater salvage, participated in diving expeditions, and in 1962 was the first woman certified by the US Navy in buoyant submarine escape. Her topic was the law of the sea as it pertained to seabed resources, a subject of particular interest to those negotiating what became the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982.4

By contrast, more than a third of the registrants at the NASOH meeting last month were women, almost all of them panel chairs or presenters, including a high school student from Michigan. With respect to this year’s Lyman Awards, women punched above their weight. Of the 126 authors and editors of the 118 books submitted for consideration, only 25 (20 percent) were women, but they represented 53 percent of the honorees. Since the awards were initiated in 1995, there have been forty-eight women honorees (three of whom have won twice)—twelve in the first fifteen years, but three times that in the fourteen years since.

Women bring different perspectives, strengths, and, occasionally, interests to whatever field they’re in, but they have often faced inane opposition from people for whom the unexamined life seems the acme of personal achievement. Twenty years ago, a male trustee of a major American maritime museum resigned to protest the appointment of a woman as executive director because, he said, women could not run maritime museums.

Today, the executive director of the International Council of Maritime Museums and the executive director of the National Maritime Historical Society—to cite two of many examples—are Kristen Greenaway and Cathy Green, respectively. Greenaway is also president of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, and Green previously headed the Wisconsin Maritime Museum.

Just as men have always written about men’s contributions to maritime enterprise, many women have done important work to uncover the diverse roles of women in maritime history, like two-time Lyman winner Kathleen Broome Williams in Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in World War II and Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea, and Lisa Norling with Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720–1870.5

Like their male peers, women historians are just as likely to write about non-gendered subjects, like two-time Lyman honorees Nancy Shoemaker, who wrote Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles: Americans in Nineteenth-Century Fiji and compiled Living With Whales: Documents and Oral Histories of Native New England Whaling History, and Jennifer Hubbard, author of A Science on the Scales: The Rise of Canadian Atlantic Fisheries Biology, 1898–1939 and A Century of Maritime Science: The St. Andrews Biological Station, co-authored by David J. Wildish and Robert L. Stephenson. (Hubbard is also a member of the Lyman Book Awards committee.)

As to the effort required to investigate subjects that fall under the rubric of diversity, equity, and inclusion…. People and societies alike tend to be lazy. This can be seen in the books that writers write, publishers publish, and readers read. Years ago, the British publisher Jonathan Cape admonished budding authors: “Always write a book about Nelson. Never write a book about South America.” More than a few have followed his advice. According to the WorldCat online network of library databases, Admiral Lord Nelson, hero of the battle of Trafalgar, during which he died 220 years ago, is the subject of 1,629 books.

Nelson is by no means the most popular individual maritime subject. Christopher Columbus rates 9,017 books. Such a high number makes sense because, whatever one’s opinion of him, his actions were vastly more consequential for the world than Nelson’s, and he’s been dead more than twice as long.

Another mainstay of the publishing industry is the Titanic, the subject of 4,587 books and counting, an enduring popularity even writers about the doomed ocean liner have trouble explaining. To be clear, Nelson and the Titanic are not famous simply for being famous. Nelson’s victories helped pave the way for Great Britain’s global domination in the nineteenth century, when the sun never sank on its sprawling empire, and the loss of the Titanic shattered public complacency about technological progress and the inequities of the Gilded Age. Writers and publishers are only human, however, and many churn out books as much to entertain and cash in on popular subjects as to add to the sum of human knowledge.

This diversion of talent and brainpower is not without consequences, because it keeps us from work that can shine light on the past while also illuminating the present and offering glimpses of paths to the future. The Atlantic slave trade, which lasted nearly four centuries, is perhaps the best example of a topic that historians have almost studiously avoided. WorldCat records only 172 books on the subject.

To consider these numbers another way, there are more than 1,600 books on one British admiral and more than 2 books for every person aboard the Titanic, but only 1 book for every 70,000 of the roughly 12 million enslaved people carried wrenched from Africa to the Americas. Equally striking is that more than 40 percent of the latter titles have appeared in the last decade, a period that happens to coincide with a global rise in calls for all aspects of society to be more inclusive, equitable, and accessible even as self-styled conservatives in the United States and elsewhere began shrieking about the “evils” of diversity.

There are various explanations for these glaring discrepancies, not the least of which is the tragic anonymity of all but a tiny handful of victims of the slave trade and the concomitant lack of sources about the experiences of specific people. Indeed, a lot of work about the slave trade treats not individuals but trends, and the starting point for much recent work has been the development of the SlaveVoyages.org, a collaborative online database decades in the making.

This is not to suggest that authors of books on the slave trade are simply exploiting a popular trend. To do so ignores the painstaking research across multiple archives in different countries, as well as the often emotionally taxing labor that goes into putting these histories on the page. (Notwithstanding twittish claims about empathy being “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization,” empathy—the process of understanding others, not pitying them, which is sympathy—is an essential part of the historian’s toolkit.)

Women historians, the slave trade, maritime labor, Native American maritime enterprise, the environment—all are essential parts of the complex that is the history of maritime enterprise. So, too, are issues of sexuality and gender, which just this week have threatened to upend the McMullen Naval History Symposium, a biennial conference held at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. John Hattendorf, dean of American (if not world) naval historians, has described McMullen as the “largest regular meeting of naval historians in the world” and the U.S. Navy’s “single most important interaction with [an] academic historical audience.”

This year’s McMullen Symposium has garnered unwelcome attention because officials directed the Naval Academy’s history department to rescind the acceptance of a paper “for reasons having nothing to do with scholarship,” as Tom McCarthy wrote in a letter resigning as chair of the department. While there has been no official announcement about the author or the paper’s subject, people familiar with the issue say it deals with issues of gender and sexuality among sailors.

The reputational harm to the Naval Academy from its decision to cancel an academic paper because of the current administration’s fear of homosexuality, among many other bugaboos, is significant, especially as it comes in the wake of the Academy’s removal of 381 books from its library on the grounds that they were there only because of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. This left the Nimitz Library in the embarrassing position of censoring Maya Angelou for her 1969 autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which ends with the birth of her son when she was seventeen, while leaving in circulation Adolph Hitler’s antisemitic, autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf, which ends with the murder of six million Jews.6

If banning books, micromanaging academic conferences, and complaining about the wrong people either doing or being the subject of history seems childish, it is. These actions combine the worst traits of a four year old whose imaginary world you disrupt to tantrums and tears with the pubescent viciousness of middle-school cliques.

We cannot ignore the dangers posed by the efforts of emotionally broken politicians to concoct exclusionary fantasy worlds. As we have seen repeatedly over the past five months, reality intrudes with ever more violent and existential consequences. Restoring a worldview based on frank and fact-based assessments of our past and present requires industry and endurance. Thankfully, these are among the historian’s great strengths.

Since their establishment in 1995, the Lyman Book Awards have honored 255 titles from more than 80 publishers.

This year’s winners were announced at NASOH’s annual conference held this year in Natchez, Mississippi.

Maritime and Nautical Archaeology

Winner

Jane Webster. Materializing the Middle Passage: A Historical Archaeology of British Slave Shipping, 1680–1807. Oxford University Press, 2024.

Maritime and Naval Biography and Autobiography

Winner

Gelina Harlaftis, ed. Onassis Business History, 1924–1975. Brill’s Studies in Maritime History, vol. 16. Brill, 2024.

Honorable mention

Andrew Lipman. Squanto: A Native Odyssey. Yale University Press, 2024.

Maritime and Naval Reference and Edited Primary Sources

Winner

Katelynn A. Hatton, Alex Christopher Meekins, eds. North Carolina Troops, 1861–1865: A Roster, Volume 22: Confederate States Navy, Confederate States Marine Corps, and Charlotte Naval Yard. North Carolina Office of Archives and History/University of North Carolina Press, 2024.

Maritime and Naval Science, Technology, and Environment

Winner

Tyler A. Pitrof. Too Far on a Whim: The Limits of High-Steam Propulsion in the US Navy. University of Alabama Press, 2024.

Honorable mention

Daniel Macfarlane. The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History. McGill-Queens University Press, 2024.

North American Maritime History

Winner

Jeff Forret. The Price They Paid: Slavery, Shipwrecks, and Reparations Before the Civil War. The New Press, 2024.

Honorable mention

Susan Gaunt Stearns. Empire of Commerce: The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade. University of Virginia Press, 2024.

North American Naval History

Co-Winner

Randy Carol Goguen. From Yeomanettes to Fighter Jets: A Century of Women in the U.S. Navy. Naval Institute Press, 2024.

Co-Winner

Abigail G. Mullen. To Fix a National Character: The United States in the First Barbary War, 1800–1805. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024.

World Maritime History

Winner

Mary E. Hicks. Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery. University of North Carolina Press, 2024.

Honorable mention

Li Tana. A Maritime Vietnam: From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge University Press, 2024.

World Naval History

Winner

Kuan-Jen Chen. Charting America’s Cold War Waters in East Asia: Sovereignty, Local Interests, and International Security. Cambridge University Press, 2024.

Honorable mention

Nick Hewitt. Normandy: The Sailors’ Story: A Naval History of D-Day and the Battle for France. Yale University Press, 2024.

SAVE THE DATE

Next year’s NASOH conference will be held in New Haven, Connecticut, May 27–30.

There were a few blemishes in the fair complexion of American white supremacy, to be sure. Most unnerving for Calhoun and his ilk was the woke mind virus of the day: the belief that slavery—treating people as property—was immoral and a violation of natural law. The abolitionist movement was especially advanced in Great Britain where, in the Somerset decision of 1772, British courts had ruled that, absent a statute explicitly establishing enslavement, an enslaved person landed in England was automatically free. As Lord Mansfield wrote, “The state of slavery is…so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law.”2

The movement to eradicate human bondage gathered strength steadily in the Anglophone world, and only seven years later even the authors of the United States Constitution—at least 20 percent of whom were slaveowners—had succumbed to its influence. Article 1, section 9, holds that the federal government could in no way hinder “the Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper [that is, enslaved people] to admit” until 1808. After that, it was open season on the international slave trade, and the government outlawed the importation of enslaved people from abroad as of 1809. However, their domestic “migration” could be facilitated via the coastal trade, and there was a flourishing traffic between the Chesapeake Bay region and New Orleans, which served the rapidly expanding cotton plantations of the Deep South.

Forret presents a detailed examination of the commercial, legal, and diplomatic wrangling that surrounded the fate of several American vessels in the domestic slave trade that either sank or sought shelter in British colonies in the western Atlantic between 1831 and 1841. The Comet went aground in the Bahamas in January 1831, followed in February 1834 by the Encomium. Stress of weather forced the Enterprise into Bermuda in February 1835, while the Hermosa wrecked in October 1840. The last involved a slave revolt aboard the Creole in 1841, which ended with the ship’s arrival in the Bahamas.

When the rescued members of the Comet’s complement, free and unfree, were landed in Nassau, the governor forbade the captain from continuing his voyage with the formerly enslaved on the grounds that in landing on British territory they had automatically become free. The rationale for this judgment came from an 1818 ruling by Sir Christopher Robinson and Lord Gifford “for the regulation of the governors of his Majesty’s colonies, upon the subject of fugitive and shipwrecked slaves brought within their jurisdictions.”

Robinson and Gifford held that British colonists could not abet the slave trade; that “a cargo of slaves” should be viewed not as “Africans illegally imported” but as “free persons on their landing”; and that by virtue of their freedom, no official could hand them over to “the person claiming ownership” without their consent.3 American law took a different view, as seen in, for instance, the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and the Negro Seamen Acts mandating the incarceration of black sailors aboard ships that docked in the ports of eight southern states, starting with South Carolina in 1822.

No sooner had the Charleston Fire and Mariner Insurance Company paid the insured their due than the president of the company wrote secretary of state and enslaver John Forsyth to ask, “What notice has or will be taken of this business by this Government?” In other words, what would Washington do to secure reimbursement for their losses? Or as the head of a New Orleans insurer of the Comet asserted, “it is confidently expected that the strong arm of the Government will be immediately put forth in order to insure redress.”

So prodded by insurers as well as by uninsured and underinsured slaveowners, and firm in the belief that the enslaved should be considered “as property and not as persons,” the administration of president and enslaver Andrew Jackson sprang into action. Initially advanced by Minister to the United Kingdom Martin Van Buren, the strongest argument in favor of returning the enslaved was that the Comet was engaged in a lawful domestic trade and that in granting the enslaved their freedom, the British had interfered in the trade of a friendly nation. (The Americans were further vexed by the hypocrisy, as slaveholding was still legal in the Bahamas.) In addition to arguing for the return of the enslaved, the United States sought “a reasonable indemnity” for damages. Alternatively, if the British refused to return the Americans’ property, Van Buren sought “all suitable compensation” for them, to the tune of about $100,000.

Disputes over the claims entangled courts and diplomats across eight presidential administrations and nine prime ministries, and involved all manner of legal and moral chicanery, not least what Forret calls “the tortured logic of slavery.” One American insurer attempted to shirk its obligations on the grounds that the loss was not covered by the policy, until a court ruled that “detention by judicial process” qualified as an enumerated risk covered by “arrests, restraints, and detainment of all kings.”

During negotiations over reparation, Andrew Stevenson, a slaveowner and the third and longest serving of Jackson’s ministers to the UK, lied to his British counterpart by claiming that the federal government compensated owners for the death of slaves “in service of the United States, even in a state of war.” Calculating their claims for reparation, the Americans offered valuations of the enslaved not in the Chesapeake ports of embarkation, but at New Orleans where demand and prices were significantly higher.

Forret devotes an entire chapter to the travails of a woman who ultimately received less than half the compensation she sought for the loss of property belonging to her late husband. This was due to “questions related to widow Ann Tutt’s hereditary claim to the indemnity, Southern gender conventions, and the legal ownership of the nine enslaved people…who were deposited onto the Comet.” The latter included Richard and Hannah Douglass and their children, Lydia, James, Robert, Martha, and Eliza, as well as Dennis Young and a woman identified only as Milly. Forret’s appendices list the names and other characteristics of the 335 enslaved aboard the Comet, Encomium, Enterprise, and Hermosa.

While the American government exerted pressed for an outcome favorable to slaveholders and their insurers, there was considerable debate in Britain over the issue of reparation. In 1834, the crown lawyers (the King’s advocate, attorney general, and solicitor general) concurred with Van Buren’s arguments in favor of restitution. Relying on the Robinson/Gifford decision, treasury official William Rothery disagreed. A decision regarding the Comet, Encomium, and Enterprise was not reached until 1839—Van Buren was president by then—and all hinged on the timing of the incidents, the circumstances of which were otherwise more or less similar.

Shortly after the Comet ran aground in 1833, Parliament had passed the Slavery Abolition Act, which entered into force in August 1834, after the Encomium went aground. The Crown lawyers finally determined that indemnity was warranted in the case of these two vessels, because their cases began before the act entered into force, but not in that of the Enterprise. In what Forret describes as “a hard-won triumph for slave-owner diplomacy,” Parliament approved restitution of £23,500 (about $4 billion today) in early August 1839.

Shortly thereafter, and before news of the restitution reached the United States, public attention turned to the fate of the enslaved aboard the Spanish-flagged Amistad who had seized the ship off Cuba and landed in the United States. (Forret does not give the latter much attention, although, as Calhoun noted on the floor of the Senate, the Spanish demands for the release of the Africans were almost identical to those made by the Americans to the British. But when the Van Buren administration appealed a lower court’s ruling that the Africans should not be returned to Cuba, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the “Africans mentioned and described in the several libels and claims.”)4

Parliament’s compensation for the people aboard the Comet and Encomium was hardly the end of the affair. Thirteen years later, insurance companies were still badgering the federal government over their losses from the Enterprise and Hermosa. Added to these were claims arising from the Creole mutiny of 1841, in which the enslaved seized their ship en route from Richmond to New Orleans and sailed it to the Bahamas. Southerners placed the blame for this outrage squarely on the British. The Richmond Enquirer seethed, “It was predicted that the protection given to the slaves in the case of the Enterprise, ‘would be the strongest inducement for flight or abduction of slaves by fraud or force from their masters’.”

In 1853, the British and Americans created a commission to rule on more than a hundred claims by various British and Americans, some of which dated were forty years old. The three most contentious and costly involved the Enterprise, Hermosa, and Creole. At an impasse, the negotiators retained an impartial third party, Joshua Bates, a Northerner banker living in London. Bates found for the insurers, securing $110,330 ($4.1 million today) for the Creole losses, $49,000 for the Enterprise, and $16,000 for the Hermosa.

The Price They Paid deftly situates the debate over reparation to slaveowners in the context of better-known issues of the day, including the independence and annexation of Texas and the negotiations that led to the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, which pointedly sidestepped the issue of restitution and fugitive slaves. Forret also notes that the issue of paying slaveowners was not limited to these cases. Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 included £20 million in payments to slaveowners divested of their erstwhile enslaved (secured in part by a £15 million loan not paid off until 2015), while in 1862 the federal government passed the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, which freed all enslaved people in Washington and paid their former owners up to $300 per enslaved. (The Emancipation Proclamation issued nine months later included no such provision.)

Common to both the United States and Great Britain is the fact that for all their claims to value the freedoms reified in the Declaration of Independence or Magna Carta, people were compensated for the loss of property but not for the loss of liberty or labor: Enslavers, yes. Enslaved, no. While efforts to secure reparations (the modern term) for descendants of the formerly enslaved are seen as a radical novelty, the issue has a long if unflattering history in the United States, and the lack of reparations has been identified as one cause of the racial wealth gap, among other systemic social maladies.

Some municipalities, universities, and other institutions have begun efforts to provide restitution of some sort to the descendants of the enslaved, and the federal government has earmarked funds for other classes of people. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 paid $20,000 to each of more than 80,000 surviving Japanese Americans interned during World War II, while the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund has already disbursed more than $15 billion to more than 65,000 claimants and is authorized to accept claims until 2090.

There is no doubt that the prospect of a reparations fund for the descendants of the enslaved is daunting both financially and logistically. But as Forret’s account of the federal government’s dogged advocacy on behalf of slaveowners over two decades in the first half of the nineteenth century ably demonstrates, what is lacking is not resources but a political willingness to champion all citizens with the same urgency it once reserved for a select few, and as the MAGA movement does today.

Jeff Forret, The Price They Paid: Slavery, Shipwrecks, and Reparations Before the Civil War (New Press, 2024).

Mainers had chafed under the yoke of Massachusetts’ exploitation of their natural resources and indifference to their needs since the 1600s, but in an 1816 vote on secession, separationists (as they were called) fell short of the 55 percent threshold they needed to achieve statehood. Inland towns, where Democratic-Republicans predominated, voted for statehood. Coastal towns, home to wealthy Federalist traders, voted against it.

The merchants’ main objection was the Coasting Law of 1789, which required vessels in coastal trade to enter and clear customs, and pay a fee, in every state they passed except states contiguous to the one from which they hailed. So long as Maine was part of Massachusetts and Massachusetts bordered New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York, Maine ships could sail between Eastport, on the Canadian border, and New Jersey ports without interruption. Were Maine its own state, however, Jersey-bound Maine ships could breeze by the 18-mile coast of New Hampshire but would have to stop in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York—and vice versa.

In 1818, the separationists’ leader, William King, lobbied for a revision of the cumbersome coasting law with the help of his older half-brother, Rufus King, a signatory of the Constitution and at the time a senator from New York. Passed in March 1819, the revised law divided the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts into two districts separated by the Perdido River on the Gulf Coast between Florida and Alabama. When Maine voted on statehood again, the margin of victory was 96 to 4.

But there was a catch. While these efforts were underway, Congress was simultaneously debating the admission of Missouri to the Union. In February 1819, a New York Republican had offered an amendment to the Missouri Statehood Bill seeking to prohibit the importation of slaves into Missouri and to free any children born there to enslaved workers at the age of twenty-five. Speaker of the house Henry Clay tied Maine’s admission as a free state to that of Missouri as a slave state, because letting in Maine by itself would have given free states a majority in the Senate. In the end, the Missouri Compromise prohibited slavery in the territory of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36°30’ parallel, except for Missouri, which was allowed to enter as a slave state.

As part of the Massachusetts delegation, Maine representatives in Congress opposed the Compromise by a margin of four to two, but many Mainers were indifferent to the issue. Mostly people were eager to shuck off nearly two centuries of rule from Massachusetts, and slavery had been effectively abolished in Massachusetts since 1783, so the reality of slavery was remote from most people’s experience. But looked at another way, so far as Mainers were concerned, the Missouri Compromise wasn’t much of a compromise.

Maine merchants, shipbuilders, officers, and crew had been directly profiting from the country’s slave economy ever since William King entered the cotton trade between New Orleans and Liverpool at the turn of the century, and the importance of the trade ballooned after the War of 1812. Although virtually no cotton was grown in the United States in 1783, by 1860 1.8 million enslaved people in the American South were producing upwards of a million tons of cotton a year—more than two-thirds of the world’s supply—about three-quarters of which was exported, mostly to Britain.

Maine ships and shippers were deeply enmeshed in this trade, as well as in carrying cotton from southern ports to New York. The port of Bath was so dependent on the slave economy that its antebellum nickname was Cotton Town.

Some Mainers also engaged in the interstate slave trade, which remained legal, while others hazarded the more profitable international slave trade, which had been outlawed in the United States in 1808. The risks of the international trade increased after the establishment of the Navy’s Africa Squadron to suppress the slave trade, but between 1850 and 1865, more than sixty ships engaged in the slave trade were either built, owned, or registered in, or captained by someone from Maine.

For some, it was all but a family business. John Gordon, a third-generation (at least) Mainer, was arrested (but apparently not convicted) for slave trading under the Piracy Act of 1820. His son, Nathaniel, from Portland, was not so lucky. In 1862, he became the only American ever executed by the federal government for the same crime.

Mainers have a lot to be proud of, to be sure, but our history is as messy as everyone else’s.

Notes:

Ronald F. Banks, Maine Becomes a State: The Movement to Separate Maine from Massachusetts, 1785–1820 (New Hampshire Publishing, 1970).

Ron Soodalter, Hanging Captain Gordon: The Life and Trial of an American Slave Trader (Simon and Schuster, 2007).

He will be hearing from his own constituents. The best way we can help now is to contact our Senators and Representatives and tell them to call on Schumer to reverse his groveling appeasement.

Senators: https://www.senate.gov/states/statesmap.htm.
Click on your state to get Senators’ phone numbers.

Representatives: https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative.
Type in your ZIP Code and call your Representative.

It’s not over until we say it is.

Squanto was born probably around 1590 and grew up in the Wampanoag settlement of Patuxet, with a childhood and adolescence that Lipman weaves together from a variety of ethnographic and historical sources. In 1614, Thomas Hunt, John Smith’s second in command, seized Squanto and two dozen other Wampanoags whom he hoped to sell into the Mediterranean slave trade. Spanish law forbade the enslavement of Native Americans (though not Africans), and when he landed at Málaga, Hunt claimed he had captured them when they attacked his ship off Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and sold them to a local priest who planned to “distribute” them to people who would employ them as servants and teach them the rudiments of Christianity before they gained their freedom.

A couple of years on, Englishmen associated with the Newfoundland Company brought Squanto to England, probably in the belief that he was from Cape Breton and thus familiar with Newfoundland. Squanto lived with John Slany, a company officer, in what is now the City of London, at the same time as Pocahontas (Rebecca Rolfe) lived in the same neighborhood. Whether they met is likely but unknown; if they did, their common language would have been English. He fared better than the younger Pocahontas, who died in March 1617. That same month (or possibly a year later), Squanto was in Newfoundland, ostensibly to serve as a go-between with the elusive Beothuks.

From there, Squanto sailed with Thomas Dermer, another of Smith’s subordinates, for the fledgling Jamestown colony, though the particulars of his stay there are unknown. Returning to England, Dermer agitated for a renewed effort to colonize New England, a scheme Squanto supported as it meant the possibility of returning home. In 1619, they landed at the English fishing settlement on Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine (or Mawooshen). From there, Squanto, Dermer, and some others harbor-hopped down the coast until they reached Patuxet, which they found strewn with the corpses of people felled in the Great Dying, as the wave of alien disease was known. Though Squanto is often portrayed as the sole survivor of his village, it seems there were others that lived with relatives nearby.

When Dermer left, Squanto remained and would likely have remained an obscure footnote in European-Native American relations like Sassacomoit and Epenow, among dozens of Wampanoags and others stolen from their homelands and forced across the Atlantic, most never to return. Yet after the Pilgrims established themselves at Squanto’s village, which Smith had named Plymouth, Squanto was thrust into the historical limelight. Previous encounters between European and Native peoples made them mutually leery, and although Squanto could speak about the English with authority, local leaders suspected he was too familiar with them to be trustworthy. When the Wampanoag decided to establish contact in March 1621, the Massasoit (chief sachem) Ousamequin appointed as intermediary a visiting Wabanaki named Samoset, whom Squanto had met on Monhegan but whose English was limited.

Squanto served as a translator when the English and Wampanoag drafted their treaty, but he was not a key figure in cross-cultural relations until the Wampanoag decided to plant their crops at Patuxet—likely at his suggestion—across Town Brook from the English settlement. Under Squanto’s tutelage, the English quickly learned how to live productively in their new land, as well as how to deal with their various neighbors. The English viewed Squanto more favorably than did his kinsmen, who suspected him of overreaching his authority—an idea supported by Squanto’s subsequent efforts to use his position as translator to manipulate Anglo-Native relations to his advantage.

That fall, Massasoit visited the prospering English settlement with about ninety men and proposed a three-day feast. “None present,” Lipman writes, “could imagine that this event, of all things, would be what later generations remembered most of the colonists’ first year at Patuxet and their friendship with the Massasoit.” Squanto remained close to the English and encouraged them to open direct lines of communication with Wampanoags to the south by sailing around Cape Cod on a voyage in which he would act as pilot. The ship made it only as far as Monomoit (Chatham), where the Monomoit entertained them generously. Before they could sail on, Squanto died, possibly from an illness that had sidelined, but not killed, Miles Standish before they left Patuxet.

Lipman’s portrait of Squanto is based on a close reading of well-known texts like Samuel de Champlain’s account of his visit to Patuxet, when Squanto was a teenager, Smith’s description of New England, and Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation, but he also benefits from more recent archival discoveries. While your conservative uncle may balk at the reinterpretation of a revered U.S. holiday, as Lipman notes, the 1621 feast “was a bit more fun than the prayerful feast imagined in national myth,” and thus more like what it is today. He also describes a far more complex, nuanced, and, frankly, interesting historical episode than that depicted in the typical grade-school pageant. The novelty of his depiction is more than welcome, and an excellent and accessible example of the historians’ craft. As Cole Porter put it,

Times have changed
And we've often rewound the clock
Since the Puritans got the shock
When they landed on Plymouth Rock.[1]

Andrew Lipman, Squanto: A Native Odyssey. Yale University Press, 2024. 264 Pages, 6.12 x 9.25 in, 12 b-w illus. Hardcover, paperback, eBook.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

[1] Cole Porter, “Anything Goes,” 1934.

John Sherwood’s A Global Force for Good—the title comes from a Navy advertising campaign that ran from 2009 to 2014—focuses on the Navy’s response to three distinct disasters: the Indonesian earthquake of 2004 (Operation Unified Assistance); Hurricane Katrina the following year; and the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and resulting nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011. Drawing on published accounts, internal reports, oral histories, and other sources, Sherwood delivers an often-intimate look at how the sea services improvise to provide humanitarian relief in unimaginably chaotic and at times-gut-wrenching circumstances in places that have experienced catastrophic physical and human loss.

When working with foreign countries, U.S. forces strive to ensure that they are seen as supporters, not leaders, of rescue and repair efforts. Moreover, the Navy and Marine Corps are at pains to not let humanitarian assistance compromise their effectiveness as a fighting force. When they do engage in such operations, they do so as auxiliaries to the State Department and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which was established in 1961 and served—until this week—as the Department of Defense’s “key partner in humanitarian response,” starting with USAID’s disaster assistance response teams (DARTs).

Following a massive earthquake on December 26, 2004, some 150,000 to 200,000 people in Aceh Province, Sumatra, died as nearly 100-foot waves broke across 100 miles of coast. An American offer of assistance was not a foregone conclusion due to tensions over Indonesia’s human right violations in East Timor, which had gained independence in 2002, and because Aceh Province was in the throes of a decades-long insurgency.

Relations were so strained that Indonesian military planners had actually war-gamed a U.S. invasion under the cover of an HADR mission. Despite these difficulties, the United States dispatched ships from Hong Kong and Guam within days. To minimize the military’s footprint on the ground, the Abraham Lincoln Strike Force remained stationed just offshore—where “there were houses floating in the ocean, and dead animals and bodies”—and served as a heliport, refueling base, and mustering station for supplies. Sailors could transfer supplies from landing craft onto Indonesian trucks by day and return to the safety of their ships at night.

According to the World Health Organization—from which the United States withdrew last month—the Navy’s intervention prevented “a secondary disaster” that would have resulted from a lack of medical services, food, and water. The diplomatic result was incalculable: The number of Indonesians who viewed America favorably more than doubled. In the words of an American major general, “we established an unquestionable bond of friendship with the world’s largest Muslim nation”—less than three and a half years after 9/11. “That is an outcome that had value beyond what was on people’s minds when we first went there and it underscores why we engage in humanitarian assistance.”

In 2011, Japan was rocked by an earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 19,000 people. The circumstances of Operation Tomodachi (“friendship”) otherwise differed from those of Operation Unified Assistance. The United States has had bases in Japan since World War II, and there were more than 47,000 uniformed personnel stationed there. While few were directly affected by the initial disaster, there was great fear of radiation poisoning when the Fukushima Daichi nuclear reactor suffered a meltdown.

Military personnel faced multiple challenges: helping the Japanese Self-Defense Force relieve coastal communities, contain the meltdown, and ensure that no other country tried to take advantage of Japan’s vulnerability. A key concern was to ensure that ships and aircraft remained free of radioactive contamination, which was easier said than done. In the midst of this, the Department of Defense also agreed to repatriate many of the 43,000 dependents living in Japan, which added more layers of complexity both there and stateside. In the end, nearly 8,000 people left, many with their pets in tow.

Civilians and pets were also at issue in the Navy’s work following Katrina, which saw the evacuation of 1.5 million people from Louisiana, abandoning some 250,000 cats and dogs in the process. The Navy’s actions were severely circumscribed because the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 forbids the military (though not the Coast Guard) from policing activities in the United States, and the Stafford Act of 1988 limits the armed services to emergency work: “clearance and removal of debris and wreckage and temporary restoration of essential public facilities and services.”

Sherwood effectively lays out the military and civilian debates over the degree to which the Navy should engage in humanitarian work and the effectiveness of HADR as a diplomatic tool and expression of soft power, all issues deserving a wide audience. A Global Force for Good seems too detailed to be a helpful guide for the “naval personnel and policymakers” for whom he wrote the book, and civilian readers will find a text awash in abbreviations and sympathize with an Army major quoted as saying that “working with the Navy is almost like learning a foreign language.”

A shorter, less jargon-forward edition would be welcome, though in today’s political climate, that is wistful thinking.

John Darrell Sherwood. A Global Force for Good: Sea Services Humanitarian Operations in the Twenty-First Century. Naval History and Heritage Command, 2024.

There are many ways to parse what is going on in Washington, some of which serve a useful purpose. Historians look into the American past to show how the actions of the Trump administration reflect those of 1960s opponents of civil rights, or 1930s fascists, or Gilded Age tycoons, or antebellum slaveholders, and how the Republican Party has gleefully gutted the liberal consensus that dominated American politics from the postwar era until 1980.1

Legal scholars—too many to name—look to the role of law to show how lawyers and judicial authorities erect defenses against patently illegal and extralegal acts. But when Congress and the Supreme Court are in the hands of people who embrace the lawlessness currently afoot, their prognostications and opinions fall on increasingly deaf ears.

Not that their views are wrong! In normal times—say, a decade ago—it would be obvious that their assessments are correct. But that was a different time. The whole nation watched Trump’s many indictments run like sand through the fingers of the judicial system over the past four years. Whatever confidence the average citizen might have had in the judiciary as a bulwark against criminality has been destroyed, thanks to Chief Justice John Roberts and his ilk.

If reports from Reddit are to be believed, many federal employees apparently want to hold their ground and decline an offer of “deferred resignation,” an offer that lacks details and may be illegal, anyway. At the same time, we are watching scores of senior executives frogmarched out of their offices while most of the US Agency for International Development (USAID)’s 10,000 employees are being removed from their jobs and uprooted from their lives overseas. Maybe there will be meaningful resistance among the 1.9 million federal civilian employees. Maybe not.

The fact that a bunch of twenty-somethings were allowed unchecked access to a government payment system that manages trillions of dollars including Social Security and Medicare payments inspires no confidence. Once your peers over in payroll have been co-opted, what’s the incentive to do the right thing, whatever that might be? But saving democracy is not in the remit of the average civil service office holder. That’s the role of Congress, official invertebrate of the United States.

Then there are the grand strategists, the pundits who will bore us all to death with their vapid, uninformed, and uninformative assessments of what’s happening. Take, for instance, a recent podcast (also transcribed) titled “Don’t Believe Him,” which holds out the fantasy that the torrent of executive orders and actions coming from the Trump White House is a sign of weakness rather than of strength.

Sure. Nothing to see here. Pretty soon the Trump administration will simply run out of bad ideas and the country will autocracycorrect.

Don’t believe it.

History can be a guide, as long as we remember that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice except when it doesn’t. We can overcome, but it will take reserves of courage, resilience, and innovation that most of us—especially white people and white men like myself in particular—since the Silent Generation have never had to muster.

The legal system only works so long as there is consensus about its validity. Once you have eroded people’s trust in the law, it loses meaning and society becomes first incoherent and then anarchic and radically undemocratic. We are well into the first phase and the only thing we can do—we who believe democracy is better than the alternatives, despite its obvious failings and failures—is to support those who fight for real justice as long as we possibly can.

There is a time and place for optimism, but it has to be grounded in reality, not wishful “thinking.” (One way that the media is broken that doesn’t get talked about enough has been the shift from reporting to syndicated op-ed writers. Steer clear of the generalists with no obvious field of expertise, which is most of them.)

More important still, don’t believe the dispiriting blather that there are “alternative facts” or we live in a “post-truth” world: Boiling water will burn you. You cannot see the sun at night. The president of the United States is an adjudicated criminal who is guilty of the crimes for which he was tried.

Legacy/traditional media outlets are increasingly controlled by predatory owners, but there are still investigative reporters doing excellent work. Find them and read them.

Finally, now that we are actually in uncharted territory, be alert to new ways of thinking and acting. Be vigilant against threats to your community and yourself. Find your people. Lift each other up. We’ll find the direction home, in time.

The field of maritime history is served by a number of fine academic journals and popular magazines, among the best known being The Mariner’s Mirror, International Journal of Maritime History, International Journal of Nautical Archaeology (IJNA), The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord, and Sea History. Between them they cover a wide range of specialties, and it is reasonable to ask whether there is any need for a new one. The first issue of Mainsheet—available in print by subscription (which I recommend) or free online—published by Mystic Seaport Museum, has allayed whatever doubts I had.

Most obvious, the production values are very high. The journal is perfect bound, printed in four-color throughout, and the paper is glossy but not shiny. One improvement that could be made is a biding that lays flat when open, the better to enjoy the lavish illustrations, which run the gamut from archival and museum images to contemporary photographs. The cover illustration depicting a sailor precariously painting the top of a cargo hold comes from a feature entitled “Unsung Heroes: The Invisible Workforce Powering Global Trade,” which showcases the work of sailors who participated in annual Life at Sea photography competitions first sponsored by the ITF Seafarers’ Trust at the height of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020. (The trust is a British charity funded by the International Transport Workers’ Federation.) With titles like “Sea Witch,” “Dirty Hands and a Sweaty Face are the Signs of Clean Money,” and the cover shot’s “Keep reaching your dreams how high it may seem,” these capture the solemnity, humor, variety, and challenges of the working seafarer’s life with an intimacy that outside observers do not, and without any sacrifice in quality.

Mainsheet’s text-based articles include both peer-reviewed scholarship and features, as well as poetry and reviews of books and museum exhibits. There are also listings of upcoming exhibits and academic opportunities and happenings (although it is not clear how helpful such time-sensitive announcements are in a biannual journal), and an obituary of Bill Pinckney, the first African American to circumnavigate the world alone and who later served as captain of the Amistad.

For non-academics, the distinction between peer- and non–peer-reviewed articles can be subtle, especially here. Akeia de Barros Gomes’s Perspectives piece, “(Life) Cycles, (Ocean) Currents, and (Ancestors’) Rhythms: Dawnland Maritime Histories through Indigenous and Black Voices,” serves as a useful introduction to Mainsheet generally and to this issue’s theme of Maritime Social History in particular, the unwieldy title notwithstanding. In it she reflects on connections between West African and Indigenous North American conceptualizations of “waterscapes as seamless intersections of land and water that create social, cultural, and spiritual understandings” and explores how they wove these understandings into “enforced concepts of Christianity.” Her focus is on the survival and transmutation of these beliefs among Indigenous and people of African descent, and she calls upon non-BIPOC people to stop forcing “global maritime narratives into a Western frame.”

De Barros Gomes’s sensitivity to this subject is due partly to her own experience as a descendant of both enslaved African and free Cape Verdean arrivals to the United States as well as to her training as an anthropologist. With respect to the latter, she is explicit about her approach to articulating what she has learned:

I will share some knowledge about this maritime history that has been shared with me (knowledge that I have permission to share) from African, African American and Indigenous community members. Of course, the Indigenous stories are not mine. They are histories that have been told to me for the purpose of sharing and education. And I have been entrusted to relay these stories truthfully, respectfully, and sensitively, with humility and in friendship.

Her concern is a valid one and shared by a growing number of people across a range of disciplines, including historians, who are increasingly urged to recognize that Indigenous communities are custodians of their own knowledge—if only because being heedless of their agency can impede research agendas.[1]

De Barros Gomes’s Perspective piece is in dialogue with several peer-reviewed articles, especially Jason R. Mancini and Silvermoon Mars LaRose’s “The Narraganset Chief, or the Adventures of a Wanderer’: Recovering an Indigenous Autobiography.” This recounts the rediscovery and offers of analysis of an obscure but riveting 195-page memoir published anonymously in 1832. The authors attribute the authorship to Charles Lansing, a peripatetic mariner who was the child of an unnamed, possibly Oneida, father and a Circassian mother (from the Black Sea coast east of the Sea of Azov) who had married as captives in Algiers. He learned of his descent from Narragansett sachems only after meeting his father—for the first time in twenty years—in a Spanish prison where they were held for fighting against the forces of Joseph Bonaparte.

The article is a fruitful mix of a scholarly approaches to the text and more personal commentaries on “the process of recovery, interpretation, and reconnection” by Mancini, former executive director of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Ledyard, Connecticut, and LaRose, a member of the Narragansett tribe and assistant director of the Tomaquag Museum in Exeter, Rhode Island.

Several other articles are devoted to often overlooked maritime cultures, notably Kevin Dawson’s “Liquid Motion: Reimaging Maritime History through an African Lens” and Alison Glassie’s “Our Lady of the Workboats: Solidarity and Spirituality on the Bay of All Saints,” about Jorge Amado’s modernist novel Mar Morto [The Sea of Death, 1936]. More familiar aspects of maritime history also get their due like Timothy D. Walker and Caroline C. Ummenhofer’s “Extracting Global Weather Data from New England Whaling and Portuguese Navy Logbooks (1740–1960)” and Alice C. M. Kwok’s “Dragon Ships to the Dawnland: Eugène Beauvois [1835–1912] and the Vinland Viking Expeditions,” which offers a fascinating take on how historians can use history not to ask questions about the past, but to shape the present through selective narrative.

If what’s past is prologue, and what to come in Mainsheet’s discharge, the future of maritime studies is in good hands.

For information on submitting articles, click here.

[1] Paleo-geneticist Jennifer Raff makes a strong case for acknowledging the prerogatives of Indigenous communities in Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas (2022).

Multivolume collections of essays present unique challenges to editors and readers alike. Editors—whether of the series or of individual volumes, or the publishing house editor—struggle to translate what sounds like a good idea into a coherent whole, while managing multiple authors is like herding cats. Coming at such a project as a reviewer poses its own difficulties. Do you focus on the set as a whole, the individual volumes, or on the fifty-four individual essays? As in photography, zooming in and out on the subject yields dramatically different results.

Before diving in, it would be helpful to know what cultural history is. Series editor Margaret Cohen offers little guidance, apart from noting that the eight thematic chapter titles "address culture understood in its expansive, anthropological sense: as designating the diverse realms of practices organizing the structure of a society."' Merriam Webster defines it as "history that especially by contrast with narrative political history concentrates upon the social, intellectual, and artistic aspects or forces in the life of a people or nation."

All of the Bloomsbury Cultural History series have the same organization: six volumes, chronologically sequenced, each with an introduction and seven "themes (and chapter titles)" that provide a framework for understanding particular "social, intellectual, and artistic aspects or forces." In the Cultural History of the Sea, these chapters are "Knowledges," "Practices," "Networks," "Conflicts," "Islands and Shores," "Travelers," "Representations," and "Imaginary Worlds." The idea is that "thematic coverage is consistent across all periods so that users can either gain a broad overview of a period or follow a theme through the ages." Curiously, each volume has a table of contents with these headings and the authors' names, but only at the start of each chapter do we learn its actual title. Some are quite straightforward. Volume 1, chapter 4 is Jorit Wintjes's "Conflict at Sea in the Ancient World," which examines a wide range of warlike encounters on and over the sea from the Persian Gulf to the English Channel through the seventh century. His approach to technological and operational change is ably handled, but, according to the above definitions, neither are cultural history.

In volume 2, Elizabeth Lambourn’s corresponding chapter, “Connected Histories of Maritime Violence in the Western Indian Ocean” engages more directly with cultural understanding. Her insights reveal as much about how historians have changed their comprehension of naval conflict in the medieval Indian Ocean as they do about the cultural aspects of naval warfare in the medieval period itself. She also offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how the chapter title began as “War” and was “renegotiated by the premodernists among us to ‘Conflicts’.” This change reflects “the various ways in which violence in a maritime context has been framed within different disciplines and methodologies” (4.96).

So far, so good. But in volume 5, chapter 4 is William Boelhower’s “Reframing Oceanic Violence: The Pax Britannica and Wild Weather during the Nineteenth Century.” Given the monumental changes in propulsive technology, hull materials, and weaponry in the 1800s, the editorial decision to allow such a stark departure from the established understanding of conflict undermines the claim that one can “follow a theme through the ages.” Framing heavy weather sailing as a type of conflict is an interesting conceit, but not one that conforms to expectations.

More troubling is the collection’s Eurocentric orientation. An almost laughable instance is found in James Seth’s “Representations: The Maritime Visual Arts in the Global Early Modern Period” (volume 3). Chinese and Indian “paintings, scrolls, and decorative objects,” he informs us, “often allude to places that many Asian artists had never visited, people they likely had never visited with, and events that they had not seen for themselves” (3.186). One could say the same of Rembrandt, who managed to paint Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee without leaving either the Dutch Republic or the seventeenth century.

Despite the vast pool of historians, maritime, cultural and otherwise, from the global south and east, all but four or five of the authors in this collection are of European, North American, or Australian origin, and fewer than 10 percent of the essays focus on non-Western subjects. Introducing volume 2, Lambourn offers an apology for the lack of coverage of non-Western subjects, although she writes thoughtfully about the role of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain interaction with, writings on, and artistic traditions of the sea, and her choice of illustrations demonstrates a deep familiarity with the material. Her chapter, “Connected Histories of Maritime Violence in the Western Indian Ocean,” is a fine introduction to the history of maritime warfare and other forms of violence in the Indian Ocean at the time of Europe’s Middle Ages.

Cannon Schmitt’s first-rate “Sea of Ink” (vol. 5) offers a close reading of the ship’s library aboard the Dulcibella, the nine-meter yawl that is “the hero” of Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands. “The gambit of this chapter,” Schmitt writes,

will be to assume that [the narrator] Carruthers’s mention of a title brings with it the entirety of the book in question as it exists outside the novel…. Inverting the usual procedure whereby historical context is invoked to interpret fiction, I take the fictional ship’s library in the Riddle of the Sands as material for a cultural history of the sea in the age of empire (5.207).

It is a brilliant play and Schmitt carries it off with aplomb. Whether this chapter fits in “Imaginary Worlds” rather than “Representations” is debatable. One could easily swap it with Charne Lavery’s “Lascars, Drifters, Aquanauts,” the subject of which is “canonical writing of the sea” in the nineteenth century, chiefly Conrad, with some reference to Melville, Verne, and others. (Note that across the series, “Representations” can be either visual or literary.) While Lavery is attentive to scientific advances and other broad historical trends of the period, she reads these authors through a literary critical lens rather than a cultural-historical one.

None of the essays in this series focuses on the Americas south of the United States. This is a missed opportunity, not least because Cohen’s general editor’s preface, which appears in each volume, invokes Derek Walcott’s “The Sea is History” (1979). Yet while Walcott’s poem presents a cultural gloss on the sea in the guise of an abbreviated Caribbean Bible— “Then came from the plucked wires / of sunlight on the sea floor / the plangent harps of the Babylonian bondage … but the ocean kept turning blank pages” —no one engages here with the outsize impact of these verses on the culture of maritime historiography in recent decades.

Criticism is easy, but there are gems here. Mirella Romero Recio’s essay, “Religious Practices at Sea in Antiquity,” covers sacred spaces, sacrifices, gods and heroes, and magic, which were among the “myriads of elements involved in the religious practices … that responded to an inner logic derived from the practice of a professional activity that constantly called for divine intervention” (1.58).

The Age of Empire includes Siobhan Carroll’s imaginatively conceived microhistory. “The Awful Prospect of Eternity: Ocean Networks and the Wreck of the Kent” examines networks in different registers—across the empire, transatlantic, and even within individual ships—through the story of an East Indiaman lost to fire in the Bay of Biscay in 1825, beginning with the retrieval of a passenger’s message in a bottle, which washed ashore in Barbados the following year. “In the stories of individual ships and people,” she observes, the British Admiralty “learned to glimpse the movements of much larger forces: winds and currents, trade and warfare, and the migrations, forced and otherwise, of human and nonhuman populations.” Here, Carroll “restages” the process to allow us to “view the story of this wreck as a window onto the scale, power, and actions of the oceanic networks of the nineteenth century” (5.103). In so doing, she models how to conceptualize and write cultural history.

Volume six, The Global Age, brings the series to a strong finish. Simone Müller’s “Conflicts: Underneath the Quiet Waves” is a harrowing investigation of the sea as dumping ground, particularly for ordnance, chemical weapons, and radioactive waste, including sixteen Soviet “nuclear reactors from submarines and icebreakers, some still with nuclear fuel, most of them in water less than one hundred meters deep” (6.102), as well as industrial waste from mine tailings to PCBs. It is noteworthy (if unsurprising) that as late as 1971, Congressional subcommittees could report that “questions on the effects of ocean dumping had ‘scarcely’ been asked and ‘then only by an obscure group of scientists, known as ecologists’” (6.106).

The environmental theme continues in Rebecca Hofmann’s “War in the Pacific,” which traces the legacy of war and imperial rivalries on the islands of Oceania. As she notes, these “continue to bear the scars of nuclear tests, while struggling with the neocolonial exploitation of their natural resources or the current issue of the Great Garbage Patch that marks the transition from the Nuclear into a Plastic Ocean” (6.138), to say nothing of the impact of climate change. John Crylen’s “Representations: On Undersea Filmmaking” offers a new way of understanding the ocean depths and how the overwhelming majority of us perceive it. His juxtaposition of how we view underwater film and aquariums is instructive, and his history of the development of underwater cinematography fascinates. The illustrations run the gamut from a 1901 cartoon from Punch captioned “‘Catching a Mermaid!’ [Submarine Photography is now possible]” to a still showing the cartoon figures Tom and Jerry swimming with Esther Williams, from the 1953 movie Dangerous When Wet, and a photograph of the underwater set for Disney’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1954).

Ariane Tanner’s “Imaginary World: The Human-Ocean Relation in Fantastic Futures of Affluence and Formidable Visions of Unsettledness” drops us firmly but reflectively in the midst of our shared ecological crisis. She begins obviously enough with a discussion of Rachel Carson, a non-swimmer whose work “exemplifies the crucial role of imagination for the understanding of the ocean” (6.183). The focus shifts to plankton, which “represents many aspects of an imagined scientific, technical and geopolitical solution to the problems faced by the Western world” (6.184). People began to understand the importance of plankton to food chains and human welfare more than a century ago, and attempts to cultivate phytoplankton for human consumption began in the 1950s. The failure of this effort underlies the plot of the dystopian movie Soylent Green (1973), in which humans became a substitute for plankton chips, which were virtually the sole source of nutrition for an overpopulated world. Tanner ties this to other understandings of the oceanic environment and its exploitation, and quotes Naomi Oreskes’ observation that the shift in our perception of the ocean from an all but inaccessible realm out of sight and mind to “a vast abode of life … and a place on which all life, both marine and terrestrial, depends is one of the most important cultural and scientific shifts of the twentieth century” (6.198).

It is rare that such a collection of essays ends as powerfully as this, but Tanner’s essay leaves no doubt about the importance of environmental understanding to the present and future of maritime history and world culture.

A Cultural History of the Sea, 6 vols., general editor, Margaret Cohen (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021; $610hc).
•Vol. 1, A Cultural History of the Sea in Antiquity, edited by Marie-Claire Beaulieu
•Vol. 2, A Cultural History of the Sea in the Medieval Age, edited by Elizabeth A. Lambourn
•Vol. 3, A Cultural History of the Sea in the Early Modern Age, edited by Steve Mentz
•Vol. 4, A Cultural History of the Sea in the Age of Enlightenment, edited by Jonathan Lamb
•Vol. 5, A Cultural History of the Sea in the Age of Empire, edited by Margaret Cohen
•Vol. 6, A Cultural History of the Sea in the Global Age, edited by Franziska Torma

Despite the norm, and even as it approaches its semiquincentennial in 2026, it’s jarring to realize that the United States also has a life expectancy. That pit in the stomachs of so many is the grief of watching a loved one in hospice.

This is not to say that the “United States” will cease to exist. It will keep the name, flag, national anthem, and other trappings of nationhood. But the second election of Donald Trump is literally a catastrophe. The political system we have today has been overturned.

People will respond to this assertion differently. Trump voters will claim that, in the words of their on-again, off-again mentor Ronald Reagan, it is morning in America. For them, Trump’s reelection represents a renewal of the American spirit, a return to first principles, an opportunity to Make America Great Again.

But a campaign slogan is nothing more than a battle cry to rally the troops, an empty vessel whose only content is whatever the shouter thinks it is.

Everyone who supported Trump knows who he is—a liar and adjudicated criminal; what he stands for—racism, misogyny, and himself; and what his intentions are—mass arrests and deportations, politicization of the armed forces, imposition of tariffs, and retribution against his critics, to cite only a few.

If you voted for Trump, when this all starts rolling out in January don’t act surprised. Embrace it. This is what you voted for, and your candidate won.

What once would have been referred to as the loyal opposition is in for a rude shock, too. The familiar tools of electoral and legal challenges, marches and protests have been promised. But such tactics seem hopelessly antiquated.

This past summer, in Trump v. United States the Supreme Court granted presidents carte blanche to do whatever they want regardless of tradition or the law. We cannot expect the Court to infringe on Trump’s actions no matter how outrageous.

And we have seen the outrages: pushing for an assault on the Capitol; support of white supremacists and Christian nationalists; the family separation policy; his calls for police brutality—one “real rough, nasty day”—; and his promise to be a dictator “only on day one” of his administration.

Obligatory nods to the Senate’s Constitutional power of “Advice and Consent” notwithstanding, it is difficult to imagine that any Republican senator will vote to block Trump appointees or any of his actions if that vote actually has any chance of tipping the balance against Trump.

This is a key point, for pundits have lost no time blaming the outcome of this election on the usual suspects of the Democrats’ “forgotten” constituencies and political missteps. But the responsibility for the loss of our democracy lies squarely with the Republican leadership.

Although political novice Trump bested eight traditional primary rivals in 2016, the Republicans embraced him in the belief they could mold him in their image. No one has underestimated and misunderstood Trump’s appeal more than Republicans.

Even before Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell repeatedly abused his power with respect to Supreme Court nominations, first by refusing hearings for an Obama nominee, Merrick Garland, nine months before the 2016 election, and then by rushing through a Trump nominee, Amy Coney Barrett eight days before the 2020 election.

Having abandoned Conservative principles to fall in lockstep behind Trump, McConnell voted not to convict the ex-president for the January 6 insurrection, although he knew “There’s no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day."

History is not an entirely reliable guide to the future. The next few years may mark a permanent turning point in our history, or they may prove to be merely a disastrous interregnum. By some miracle—and it will take nothing less—the United States may survive Trumpism and return to its roots as a nation founded on the principle of equality for all.

The odds aren’t great, although as we saw with his pandemic response, building “the wall,” “infrastructure week,” and countless other failures—to say nothing of his six business bankruptcies—Trump’s long suit is staggering incompetence.

Regardless, the democracy and republic we enjoy today ends in a couple of months. For now, the best course of action might be to rest up. Pay attention, but don’t despair of not knowing how to respond. What lies ahead is unimaginable, and as of yet, there is no playbook for how to navigate it written in American English.

On the crisis of the United States government forcibly separating children from their parents at the border, Sen. Susan Collins has once again demonstrated that she is the worst kind of dangerous. It is not a superlative to be proud of.

Since taking her seat in 1997, Collins has claimed the mantle of “moderate,” a term lacking a clear definition. Generally speaking, however, a moderate is one who can see both sides of an issue and act accordingly. With few exceptions, Collins gives lip service to ideas not supported by the Republican leadership, but then votes with them anyway.

Throughout her tenure, Collins has mouthed benign platitudes about bipartisanship and alternative viewpoints, but as the Republican Party has hurtled right, she has always identified with party rather than principle. She has no discernible core values.

This was true in her support of the Patriot Act in 2001, a hideous piece of government overreach against which any Republican committed to limited government should have voted.

It was true in her support of President Trump’s Cabinet nominees, especially her vigorous championing of the demonstrably racist Jeff Sessions to be attorney general and her “yea” vote in committee for the staggeringly ill-qualified foe of public education Betsy Prince DeVos as secretary of education.

Responding to Trump’s fawning remarks about neo-Nazis in Charlottesville last year, Collins said that he should have been clearer about his stance on the murderous rioters there. But she declined to condemn the president when he doubled down on his hateful rhetoric.

Instead, she falls back on inane pronouncements like “we need to accept that Donald Trump is our president,” as though the office is an anointed position rather than an elected one.

Collins subsequently gave herself a pass on defending the Affordable Care Act. After implausibly claiming that Mitch McConnell had made an “ironclad” commitment to stabilize the ACA, when he broke his patently fraudulent promise, she feigned surprise and refused to condemn him for not bringing reform measures to a vote.

Which brings us, predictably enough, to Collins’ remarks Sunday regarding the administration’s vicious ripping of immigrant children from their families – in at least one case, from their mother’s very breast – and placing them who knows where.

Her best suggestion? Return to a piece of legislation that failed in February after – as Collins herself put it – “the Department of Homeland Security issued an inflammatory press release that torpedoed the bill.”

What makes Collins so dangerous? Since it became apparent that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee, Collins has pretended to distance herself from him. She registers his hate, but she refuses to see it for what it is.

“I do not believe that he is in favor of anti-Semitism or racism or Nazis,” she said of his remarks on Charlottesville, “but when he says that there were some ‘fine people’ in that group, it sends the wrong message.”

If Collins is waiting for Trump, Sessions or their establishment fellow travelers to say plainly, “I hate blacks and Jews,” she might be able to dodge the reality a bit longer, mustering fake umbrage and soldiering on.

But ignoring manifestations of racism and anti-Semitism that fall short of direct statements, a return to slavery, or the establishment of concentration camps demonstrates an appalling ignorance of history and a horrifying naiveté.

Indeed, Collins equivocated on the Trump administration’s grotesque and brutal treatment of immigrants and their children even as the world likened the detention centers in which they are held to concentration camps.

The United States as an ideal – what George Washington called “The Great Experiment” and Ronald Reagan compared to “a shining city upon a hill” – is under mortal threat.

The kidnapping of immigrant children is only the latest of the many weapons that Trump and his ilk have plunged into the beating heart of the American promise.

pressherald.com/2018/06/22/maine-voices-sen-collins-must-stop-equivocating-as-trump-tramples-american-ideals/