The Naval Historian and His Sources

Abstract

naval history as a formal field of research and writAMERICAN ing is of relatively recent origin. Its beginnings reach back into the 19th century with the works of James Fenimore Cooper, and it was given a tremendous boost by the writings of Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan at the turn of the century. Since then interest in naval history has spread, especially since World War II, until today more scholars than ever before are engaged in active research. Naval history, however, was slow to develop as an academic field. The hallowed tradition of the late 19th century and early 20th century was that naval history should be written by officers, ex-officers, or civilians closely connected with the service. This type of naval literature, although a pioneering effort, left much to be desired. The glamour of naval operations, the heroics of battle, and the thrill of escapes at sea enthralled a generation of readers. The public's image of the United States Navy was molded in large part by writers whose personal tastes dictated the choice of events around which they wove their stories. Mercifully, during the 1920's, authors of American naval history ceased to consider their field as merely a branch of literature and attempted to write Naval officers and a handful of academicians trained in the scientific method sought to make generalizations. They depended primarily upon their own ingenuity for gathering materials, and the quality of their work depended upon their training and initiative. Their search for objectivity sometimes hampered their pursuit of broad inferences. A corner was turned in 1933 when James Phinney Baxter III published The Introduction of the Ironclad Warship (Cambridge, 1933). This book was a wonderful stimulus to scholarship. The time had come, historians realized, to explore areas other than operations, and they began preparing the way for the development of formal naval history. The most significant of these general works was the two-volume survey by Harold and Margaret Sprout, The Rise of American Naval Power, ijj6-igi8 (Princeton, 1939) and Toward a New Order of Sea Power: American Naval Policy and the World Scene (Princeton, 1940) . While the Sprouts were probing the political aspects of the United States Navy, Bernard Brodie in his Sea Power in the Machine Age (Princeton, 1941 ) was concerned with the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the chang-