ALTHOUGH HISTORIC PRESERVATION efforts date to the last century, a comprehensive, systematic, and professional approach to historic preservation and cultural management can be traced to the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. Since that pioneering legislation, the practice of preservation has grown and, while tempered with occasional failures, setbacks, and problems, has seen marked improvement as well as a general broadening of its scope. One class of cultural resources, however, did not benefit from the mounting support for historic preservation. Although it enjoyed a romantic image, preservation remained for years outside of the preservation mainstream. By the mid-1980s, preservationists faced a crisis. Although they had benefitted from the National Maritime Heritage Preservation Grant Program, administered between 1978 and 1982 by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, they had created no basic inventory of resources. Nor, for that matter, did they agree about what constituted a maritime resource or what priorities for preservation should be. Ships, shipwrecks, lighthouses, and other sites were underrepresented in both the National Historic Landmarks (NHL) program and the National Register of Historic Places. No basic standard or guideline for the preservation of ships existed. While historic buildings and industrial facilities enjoyed preservation through documentation under the auspices of the Historic American Buildings Survey and the Historic American Engineering Record (HABS/HAER), a sister program for ship recordation, the Historic American Merchant Marine Survey (HAMMS) died in 1939. For resources, the benefits of historic preservation practice since