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Mahan in Dock: Reassessing the Navyandthe Navalist Kenneth J.Hagan,ed. In Peace and War: Interpretations ofAmerican NavalHistory, J775-J978. Westport,Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978. 368+xii pp. Rovce G.Shingleton.John Taylor Wood: Sea Ghostof the Confederacy. Athens: Cmversity of Georgia Press, 1979.242 + xivpp. Craig L.Symonds,ed. New Aspects o{Naml Histo1:i·: Selected Papers Presented at the FourthNavalHisto1:v Srmposium, UnitedStates NavalAcademy i\-26October1979. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press,1981.398 + xvpp. Gordon H.Warren.Fountain of Discontent: TheT,entAffair and Freedom of the Seas. Boston: NortheasternUniversity Press, 1981. 301+xivpp. Frederick C. Drake Sincethe publication in 1972of Peter D. Karsten's The Naval Aristocracy: TheGolden Age of Annapolis and the Emergence of Modern American Nava/ism, American naval historians have been conducting a major overhaul ofthe subject. They believe their discipline has broken from its past constraintsof adulatory biography, a narrow concentration on fleet tactics to illustrate"command of the seas," and a long-lasting reverence for anything writtenby the high priest of navalists, Alfred Thayer Mahan. Kenneth J. Hagan,for example, whose own book in 1973-American Gunboat Diplomacyand the Old Navy- helped to challenge the hegemony of the Mahanians ,opens his edited collection of essays on the re-interpretation of the U.S.Navyfrom 1775-1978by quoting Richard W.Leopold's comment, made in1973, that naval history remained "a field sorely in need of the scholarly touch"(p. xi). Hagan, however, points to Karsten as an epitome of younger scholars"who have turned their attention toward American naval history inthe past decade. The result has been a series of monographs, essays, andpapers that attempt to assess the navy as an institutional expression ofthe American experience. Gone today is the hagiographic and eulogistic toneso characteristic of earlier American naval historiography. In its place canbe heard the dispassionate voices of careful scholars'' (p. xi). Likewise, CraigL. Symonds, in the foreword to New Aspects of Naval History, praises theselections printed from among the papers delivered at the Fourth Naval Canadian Reviewof American Studies, Volume 15,Number 4, Winter 1984,407-420 408 Frederick C.Drake History Symposium, held at Annapolis, by claiming that "they demonstrate that naval historical scholarship is no longer exclusively concerned with battles, leaders, and tactics .... Naval scholars in the 1980's are addressing themselves more to issues of political and international dimension thanto the frequency of Admiral Jellicoe's crossing of the "T" at Jutland" (p.ixl. Readers are reminded, furthermore, of the suggestion by David Trask.the keynote speaker at the 1977 Annapolis symposium, that this was a typeof coming of age: "If we do not yet constitute a school, we are at leasta kindergarten." Symonds argues that the quality and intensity of the papers from the 1978symposium suggest that "this new aspect of naval historyhas now passed well beyond that modest claim'' (p. ix). All well and good.Firing celebratory salvoes has always been a part of naval ritual. The worksund~ review in two edited volumes-containing some forty-six papers, three comments and a personal memoir-and in two monographs which cover aspects of Union and Confederate Civil War naval history, give a reader the chance to see whether the salvoes contain smoke or substance. New Aspects of Naval History is divided into three parts: "The Evolution of Western Navies" (thirteen papers); "Naval Policy and the Naval Mission Since 1800" (eleven papers); and "Strategy, Intelligence, and Commandin World War II" (five papers, three comments and a personal memoir). PartI is much the most wide-ranging of the three, with essays spanning from Hellenistic and Roman warship types to the invention of radar in the twentieth century. The section is a somewhat curious composite of tech· nological history, ranging over galley design, policy responses to changing ship construction in nineteenth-century Britain, and radar development; 1 naval archaeology ;2 dockyard developments, shipbuilding and logisticalsup· port at bases in the Americas; 3 state navies of the American revolution;4 a survey of the Russian Navy from 1682-1854; 5 studies of merchantmen con· version to warships in medieval England and the battle of Lepanto of 1570. 6 The most notable essay in the section is by Lt. Colonel (U.S.A.F...

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