Aviation History in the Wider View

Abstract

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 field 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 field of history in terms of what it means to others.