Aviation History in the Wider View

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Review Essays AVIATION HISTORY IN THE WIDER VIEW JAMES R. HANSEN In May 1988 a newly formed aviation history advisory board of the Smithsonian Institution Press (SIP) held its inaugural meeting at the SIP’s offices in Washington, D.C. As one of the most active publishers in aviation history, the SIP and its director, Felix Lowe, sought the advice of prominent scholars in the held on what his organization might do in the coming years to improve its offerings. Although several promising ideas surfaced during the meeting, one sentiment prevailed: the need for more attention to the social and cultural ramifications of aviation history. Too many books on aviation history, and not just those published by the Smithsonian, ignore the “big questions,” board members argued. Books for airplane buffs have been published in great abundance since aviation’s rise to military prominence during World War I, and since the end of World War II the number of scholarly monographs on a great variety of essential topics in both civil and military aviation history has grown steadily. But while that activity has gone on in testimony to both the popular enthusiasm for flight and the recognized importance of aviation in shaping the modern world, synthetic works taking a wider view and looking at the social motives, aims, and second-order consequences of the aviation enterprise have not appeared. In this respect, aviation history has fallen behind other fields of history (including space history), wherein broadly synthetic, contextual, and interdisciplinary studies explore the meaning of a particular held of history in terms of what it means to others. There was not enough time at this first meeting of the SIP advisory board to discuss this riddle of aviation historiography at great length. Nonetheless, the board felt strongly enough to recommend that the Press consider commissioning a panoramic historical study of the Dr. Hansen is an associate professor in the Department of History at Auburn University and the historian for NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.© 1989 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/89/3003-0009S01.00 643 644 James R. Hansen place of aviation in the modern world, comparable in some ways perhaps to Walter A. McDougall’s Pulitzer Prize—winning book, . . . the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985). The person to undertake this project should perhaps not be a specialist in aviation history, just as McDougall is not a specialist in space history; rather, the person should be a distin­ guished historian cum generalist whose scholarship rests outside the field of aviation history but whose experience in social or political history or in the history of technology might provide a fresher and bolder insight, a more complete and all-embracing understanding, and a more provocative way of looking at the subject than might a con­ tribution from any specialist. (The names of Daniel Boorstin, William H. McNeill, and Thomas P. Hughes were among those mentioned.) Lowe accepted the advice of his board with some enthusiasm and has followed up on the idea.1 The discussion sketched here suggests much about the current state of aviation historiography. More than any other recent indicator I know, the recommendation by the SIP’s board of advisers to commis­ sion an outsider to take a wider view sheds light on the common if unspoken frustrations and anxieties, as well as the high hopes, of specialists in the field. Something important is missing, they must feel—something that can help put together that which is loose and fragmentary; something that can make aviation history more mean­ ingful in the overall record of human existence; something they find themselves unable to provide. The essay that follows is meant to explore this sentiment for a more circumfluent aviation history and to raise some preliminary, perhaps contentious, and, it is hoped, provocative ideas about how historians of aviation might move toward a wider view of their subject.2 The 'Attending the May 1988 meeting were Smithsonian Institution Press editorial advisory board members Roger Bilstein (University of Houston—Clear Lake City), Sylvia D. Fries (NASA History Office), Richard P. Hallion (Andrews...