Please give a warm welcome to Noor Hashmi, who is joining site staff as our Manchester Correspondent.  Noor Hashmi is currently pursuing an MA in Early Modern History at The University of Sheffield, where her research focuses on Caribbean slavery during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in Barbados and Jamaica. She previously completed a BA (Hons) in History at the University of Sheffield, graduating in July 2024. Following her undergraduate studies, Noor was awarded a Sheffield Postgraduate Scholarship. Her BA dissertation, titled ‘A Study of Medicine and Diseases in the Middle Passage,’ offered a comparative and chronological social and cultural analysis of how British surgeons and enslaved people treated diseases in West Africa, aboard slave ships, and in the Caribbean, as well as the motivations underpinning these practices. During her postgraduate studies, Noor’s research has expanded to examine Manchester’s historical connections to slavery. She was awarded the Dorothy Phillips Prize for Historical Research for the best funding proposal to support archival work for her MA dissertation. She also held the role of MA Social Secretary within the Department of History and Archaeology’s Postgraduate Forum, where she was responsible for organising and overseeing key events such as the PGR Colloquium, while also acting as a representative for MA students, voicing their concerns and contributing to departmental discussions. For any enquiries and projects, please contact her via email ([email protected]). Noor can also be found on Bluesky and Instagram.

2 October 2025 Andrew Livsey, King’s College London Sea Power Thought in the Cold War 16 October 2025 Ben Redding, University of East Anglia 1650s and 60s, Officer Radicalism in the English navy 30 October 2025 Asif Shakoor, Independent Scholar & Georgie Wemyss, University of East London ‘Unearthing Invisible Seafaring Histories of Empire’: Title to be Confirmed 13 November 2025 Alex Clarke, Independent Naval Historian & Founding Member of ShipShape Procurement for Peace 27 November 2025 Synnøve Marie Kvam, Project S/S Wanja & M/V Mim S/S Wanja and M/V Mim: the Ships that Changed Strategies in the North Atlantic early in WWII The Proctor Memorial Lecture: to be held at Lloyds Register 11 December 2025 Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, University of Iceland “We won!” The Cod Wars and the confessions of a historian who became head of state Registration for the Proctor Lecture on the 11th of December 2025 is to be done via the BCMH website Lectures & Events : British Commission for Maritime History The King’s Maritime History Seminars for 2025-26 may be attended in person or online. As always, attendance is free and open to all. To take part, you must register by visiting the KCL School of Security Studies Events page, here: www.kcl.ac.uk/security-studies/events.   Online attendees will receive instructions shortly before the event, by email, about how to join. Otherwise, we will meet in person, as usual, in the Dockrill Room, KIN 628, at King’s College London. Papers will begin at 17:15 GMT. The King’s Maritime History Seminar is hosted by the ‘Laughton Naval Unit’ and the ‘Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War’ in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. It is organised by the British Commission for Maritime History (www.maritimehistory.org.uk) in association with the Society for Nautical Research (https://snr.org.uk/). For further information contact Dr Alan James, War Studies, KCL, WC2R 2LS ([email protected]).

Faith Currie is the Lead Museum Educator at the National Museum of the Great Lakes where she’ll be one of several knowledgeable and engaging guides of SS Edmund Fitzgerald specialty tours honoring and remembering the 50th Anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, she is a regular contributor to the quarterly journal Inland Seas, she is a certified nature journaling educator through the Wild Wonder Foundation, and an artist with public art in the city of Toledo. Currie is also the host of the Sunday night radio program The Great Lakes St. Lawrence Story System on WAKT community radio in Toledo. “Compared with the usual fate of humans, we who are engaged in preservation work, daily in contact with what we most like and admire, are fortunate indeed.” —Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage I am “fortunate indeed” that my work days revolve around things that are fundamental to me—the Great Lakes and the myriad bodies of water, fields, forests, flora and fauna around and between them. And, that I have the native Rust Belter’s nostalgic pride in industry, and intrinsic appreciation for the utilitarian. I have been on the historic lake freighter I work on around 200 times and I have never not been impressed the moment I stepped on deck. In his 1957 classic “Interpreting Our Heritage,” Freeman Tilden endeavored to define interpretation, thus: For dictionary purposes to fill a hiatus that urgently needs to be remedied, I am prepared to define the function called interpretation, by the National Park Service, by state and municipal parks, by museums and similar cultural institutions as follows: An educational activity which aims to reveal meanings and relationships through the use of original objects, by firsthand experience, and by illustrative media, rather than simply to communicate factual information. I conduct guided tours for groups of all ages on the SS Col. James M. Schoonmaker. While those tours all convey much of the same information, I adapt each one to meet the group in front of me. If they are senior citizens who’ve grown up in Toledo, I’m prepared to talk about the S.S. Willis B. Boyer and answer variations on the question, “Why would somebody change the boat’s name?” If they’re farmers from rural Ohio, I know I’ll be reserving time for extra discussion in the galley and a visit to the engine room’s tool displays. One woman thanked me at the end of a tour, saying, “My son is in the Navy and I want to thank you for this, because now I know how important the Great Lakes are to our country. I have an understanding I didn’t have before.” School kids from Downriver Detroit might get an extra story about the J.W. Westcott Company which operates from the foot of 24th St. in Detroit. No two tours are identical. Kids from kindergarten through high school, and their grown-ups, get the best version for them. When I take kids on the boat, I have two overriding interpretive goals. One is to make space for their questions and reactions to what they are experiencing. The other is to help them discover the relationships between what they’re learning and their own lives. Some things like the two-bed four-person Oilers and Wipers cabin are easy. While they look at the cabin, I tell them what Oilers and Wipers did. I talk about shift-work. I tell them about the working environment on a coal-fired steamship. Then I tell them about hot bunking. They are generally and delightfully appalled. I ask, “Do you think you would like to trade shifts and share a cabin like this?” The answer is always a resounding, “No.” My favorite place to board is midship into the hold. When kids step through the door into the vast center hold they are awed. Not only is “awed” a good state of mind to start them off with, it makes for a breathtaking experience when they climb the narrow ships ladder and emerge on the deck facing the Maumee. As for relating personally from the hold to the deck, most of them have seen a freight train passing; oftentimes with open coal cars. I ask them how many coal cars worth of coal they think fit in the hold. When we get up to the deck, they can see the river, the city skyline, the double-leaf bascule bridges they’re standing between, and railroad tracks. We walk down the deck and enter the galley through the crew mess. The galley is something they recognize, so the stories tend toward the roles of the steward, cook, and porter. Their eyes are as big as the saucers behind the fiddle rails in the metal cabinets when I tell them about the quality and the amount of food prepared for the sailors. We talk about scratch cooking, holiday menus, and Saturday steak nights. At that point, I like to ask who’s had a frozen microwave meal and every hand goes up. Now they’re ready for a story they have the life experience to understand. I point to the freezers installed by the owners in the 1970s. I explain how even before most families had microwaves in their homes, the same companies whose names we recognize on microwave meals today were making large frozen meals for cooking in ovens. I tell them how the owners wanted to save money by having less “home-cooked” food. When I get to, “What do you think the sailors thought of that?,” their reactions are similar to the idea of hot bunking. “You’re right,” I say, and tell them that the company went back to the old meals by the end of the season because the crew were threatening to go elsewhere next season. The galley staff’s cabins are of particular interest to them when they find out that families used to live in those spaces when a parent took the winter layup ship keeper position. There are many spots throughout the boat to make these connections, and enough suitable ones to […]

GlobalMaritimeHistory welcomes proposals for our new series ‘Academic Processes and Digital Humanities’. We are looking for people to talk about the processes (especially technical processes) that they use to do their research, analysis or both.  Some of the things we would love to have you write about Transcription of Documents Textual Analysis Materials Analysis Materials Conservation/Art Conservation Mapping, GIS and related topics Use of R and data visualization Databases and their varied uses Using websites to display projects and findings Collective projects/collaboration This series is very much about these processes, and it is not at all required that your research be on a maritime topic. If how you do what you do is neat and you think that it would interest other people or help other people with their research, we would love to hear from you. Proposals do not need to be any particular length. The blogposts should be approximately 800-1000 words, however we absolutely do encourage longer posts. We also encourage embedded youtube videos, images, anything that can be embedded into our posts. Also, please do not feel the need to moderate your enthusiasm. This is an audience that appreciates procedural and technical enthusiasm. Posts should be written for an educated but not expert audience. Links to tutorials and similar material is always appreciated. We are also open to tutorial videos, or other formats instead of written blog posts. If it is technically possible to be done on WordPress then we are very much open to creative approaches to discusses processes.  If you are unable to submit something in the near future but are interested in contributing over the longer term, please do get in touch. We’d love to hear from you as well. This series is open to grad students, early career researchers as well as more established researchers. We will not be entertaining any proposals either written by or having to do with the use of generative AI. If you are interested in contributing to this series please email Dr Samuel McLean

GlobalMaritimeHistory welcomes proposals for our new series ‘Academic Processes and Digital Humanities’. We are looking for people to talk about the processes (especially technical processes) that they use to do their research, analysis or both.  Some of the things we would love to have you write about Transcription of Documents Textual Analysis Materials Analysis Materials Conservation/Art Conservation Mapping, GIS and related topics Use of R and data visualization Databases and their varied uses Using websites to display projects and findings Collective projects/collaboration This series is very much about these processes, and it is not at all required that your research be on a maritime topic. If how you do what you do is neat and you think that it would interest other people or help other people with their research, we would love to hear from you. Proposals do not need to be any particular length. The blogposts should be approximately 800-1000 words, however we absolutely do encourage longer posts. We also encourage embedded youtube videos, images, anything that can be embedded into our posts. Also, please do not feel the need to moderate your enthusiasm. This is an audience that appreciates procedural and technical enthusiasm. Posts should be written for an educated but not expert audience. Links to tutorials and similar material is always appreciated. We are also open to tutorial videos, or other formats instead of written blog posts. If it is technically possible to be done on WordPress then we are very much open to creative approaches to discusses processes.  If you are unable to submit something in the near future but are interested in contributing over the longer term, please do get in touch. We’d love to hear from you as well. This series is open to grad students, early career researchers as well as more established researchers. We will not be entertaining any proposals either written by or having to do with the use of generative AI. If you are interested in contributing to this series please email Dr Samuel McLean

GlobalMaritimeHistory welcomes proposals for our new series ‘Academic Processes and Digital Humanities’. We are looking for people to talk about the processes (especially technical processes) that they use to do their research, analysis or both.  Some of the things we would love to have you write about Transcription of Documents Textual Analysis Materials Analysis Materials Conservation/Art Conservation Mapping, GIS and related topics Use of R and data visualization Databases and their varied uses Using websites to display projects and findings Collective projects/collaboration This series is very much about these processes, and it is not at all required that your research be on a maritime topic. If how you do what you do is neat and you think that it would interest other people or help other people with their research, we would love to hear from you. Proposals do not need to be any particular length. The blogposts should be approximately 800-1000 words, however we absolutely do encourage longer posts. We also encourage embedded youtube videos, images, anything that can be embedded into our posts. Also, please do not feel the need to moderate your enthusiasm. This is an audience that appreciates procedural and technical enthusiasm. Posts should be written for an educated but not expert audience. Links to tutorials and similar material is always appreciated. We are also open to tutorial videos, or other formats instead of written blog posts. If it is technically possible to be done on WordPress then we are very much open to creative approaches to discusses processes.  If you are unable to submit something in the near future but are interested in contributing over the longer term, please do get in touch. We’d love to hear from you as well. This series is open to grad students, early career researchers as well as more established researchers. We will not be entertaining any proposals either written by or having to do with the use of generative AI. If you are interested in contributing to this series please email Dr Samuel McLean

Thank you to Decklan Wilkerson for this post, the first of a new series. Decklan Wilkerson is a graduate of James Madison University’s history graduate program. Having specialized in studies pertaining to unconventional warfare in his undergrad, he applied that knowledge in his thesis “Raising the Grey Flag: Privateering as a Form of Warfare between the Years of 1775 to 1815”. He asked the question of whether or not the mass usage of privateering was itself a naval strategy that shared links with modern hybrid warfare and if the role of privateers has simply been replaced by more modern avenues. With a wealth of background in unconventional warfare, he was able to draw on past experience in analyzing privateering under a new light. With a mixture of careful analysis and a penchant for vignetting, the thesis won the Carlton B. Smith award for best thesis that year. He also capped off his graduate career with multiple large scale projects, such as assissting with the Histories Along the Blue Ridge project. During said project, he digitized, indexed, and created metadata for the entirety of the Augusta Country Newspaper collection. Along side that, he has been actively engaged with multiple museums in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. While much of what he has done has been proposal writing and research, there are a few exhibits that he has helped to produce, such as a digital one on the changes in the Virginia constitution named “State of Change”. Looking to the future, he intends to attend a PhD program in the United Kingdom as he attempts to flesh out what British privateers were up to during the American Revolution. By doing so, he hopes to fill a hole in the american-centric histography of privateering during the Revolutionary War. Once that is done, he intends to have the entirety of his findings published in a book. Introduction The historiography surrounding American privateers has fluctuated quite a bit between the 20th and 21st centuries. One of the earliest works arguing the importance of American privateers during the Revolutionary War and War of 1812 was A History of American Privateers, written by Edgar Maclay in 1899. Maclay argued that furnishing the history of the US Navy without a full record of privateering would create an incomplete story. Indeed, he did excellent work at the time, assembling the data and stories of privateers that were scattered all over. Specifically, he was able to provide data pertaining to the number of American privateer vessels and their total amount of guns compared to that of the Continental Navy during the American Revolution. That does not mean it is a complete or full set of information, as the number of private vessels can be a difficult thing to tack down when it comes to the American Revolution as compared to the War of 1812’s centralized sources like Niles Weekly Register. He was even so bold at times to suggest that American privateers were the “predominating feature of our early sea power.” Scholars would take his argument rather seriously, with Nathan Miller incorporating privateers into his grand 1927 book, The U.S. Navy: a History. Yet, there seems to have been a bit of a lull for many decades, with the discussion of privateers seemingly being kept to their relationship with great men like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. That is not to say the works done during this time are not helpful to the field, as Willian Clark’s contribution to the story of Benjamin Franklin’s privateers cannot be understated. It would not be until the late 2010s that the topic of privateers would be reinvigorated and not be seen as “simply a sideshow to the exploits of the Continental Navy.” New works once again delve into the topic of privateering, analyzing its contribution to the American way of war. Many have questioned the idea of it simply being legalized piracy and, instead, have explored the often-mixed motivations of American privateers. Scholars like Eric Dolin and Anthony Green would come across very similar findings about the subjects of effectiveness and motivation in their works on the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. For instance, both found a mixture of two motivations for privateers: economic gain and patriotism. Alongside this return to the examination of privateering came some mixing of newer military theories, with recent scholars like Kenneth Moss making mention of the crossover between privateers and hybrid warfare in Marque and Reprisal’s concluding remarks. There are still a few critical questions surrounding American privateers, though. When it comes to detailing the true extent of privateers’ contribution to the Revolutionary War, the focus has primarily focused on economic damage and gain dealt by privateers. This has almost always utilized monetary amounts rather than direct products, as the total monetary amount can be calculated or found in sources much more easily. Looking to petitions, letters, or newspapers can often give a monetary amount, but to judge the total of a specific product that American privateers captured during the revolution has often been something few have attempted. This not only applies to privateers but to other areas of scholarship like American merchants and gunpowder. Even Brian DeLay, in “The Arms Trade and American Revolutions,” argues that the dependence of the Continental Army on foreign arms trade mostly relies on monetary evaluations of arms and powder sent to the rebels. Mentions of war goods brought in by privateers almost always rely on specific “windfalls,” such as the taking of the British supply ship Nancy. As such, there is still a key question of the amount of important goods, such as gunpowder, that American privateers captured during the Revolutionary War. This series of articles seeks to explore many of the avenues other scholars have yet to delve into. For one, a deep dive into privateering utilizing the new theories of hybrid warfare and the grey zone has yet to be undertaken. Alongside that, few have been bold enough to differentiate the mass usage of privateers as its […]

Hello Everybody, We are so thankful to our readers for their past support.   This year, things have changed. Where in the past we were hosted by Dreamhost, we have just this past week switched to Web Hosting Canada, on a 3 year contract.   Our costs for this year’s fundraiser are   Web Hosting Canada- $159.47 GoDaddy (DNS) – 69.22 Google (File Storage) – $31.63   Total Fundraising Goal for 2025/26: $275 CAD   If any funds are received in excess they will be kept in the account for next year against the DNS and Google costs.   The future of the website is secure for the next few years. and I’m delighted with the quality of the support that our new hosts have provided in this transition.   Hopefully this is the last fundraiser that we’ll need to do until 3 years from now when we have to sign a new hosting agreement.   The goals for the next few years are to finish the ADM8 Database and to promote so it can be used by researchers, as well as to make public a number of other databases containing historical documents. As always we will do everything we can to encourage new maritime researchers in their work and provide them a platform to talk about the cool things they are doing and finding.   This year’s fundraiser can be found at https://gofund.me/177b3353

Hello Everybody, We are so thankful to our readers for their past support.   This year, things have changed. Where in the past we were hosted by Dreamhost, we have just this past week switched to Web Hosting Canada, on a 3 year contract.   Our costs for this year’s fundraiser are   Web Hosting Canada- $159.47 GoDaddy (DNS) – 69.22 Google (File Storage) – $31.63   Total Fundraising Goal for 2025/26: $275 CAD   If any funds are received in excess they will be kept in the account for next year against the DNS and Google costs.   The future of the website is secure for the next few years. and I’m delighted with the quality of the support that our new hosts have provided in this transition.   Hopefully this is the last fundraiser that we’ll need to do until 3 years from now when we have to sign a new hosting agreement.   The goals for the next few years are to finish the ADM8 Database and to promote so it can be used by researchers, as well as to make public a number of other databases containing historical documents. As always we will do everything we can to encourage new maritime researchers in their work and provide them a platform to talk about the cool things they are doing and finding.   This year’s fundraiser can be found at https://gofund.me/177b3353