From the USS Constitution in Boston Harbor to the Mary Rose in Portsmouth to the Vasa in Stockholm, Museum ships and Maritime museums have been popular and beloved sites for engaging with public history. Many of these sites have done yeoman’s work in presenting their specific stories and broader histories to a general public. But with the raise of innovative and genre-redefining micro-historical public history projects such as New York’s Tenement Museum and David Olusoga’s A House Through Time (BBC Two), what lessons should public historians draw about the potential to tell truly global stories through microhistories of these maritime vessels? Gathering together a panel of global historians, maritime historians, and public history scholars, this panel will explore the ways in which the histories of specific examples of maritime technology have been told and contextualized in the past, the ways in which those engaging with those histories have absorbed them, and the possibilities that exist for presenting expanded histories of them, based on new knowledge both of the technologies they represent, and of the historical contexts in which they are situated.

The session will begin with Julia Stryker’s examination of the decision by the United Kingdom’s Public Records Office to de-acquisition thousands of boxes of Crew Agreements, contracts signed by seafarers as the beginning of each voyage, and the dramatic tale of how these documents were rescued from destruction. Weaving together the rise of public interest in genealogy with the promise of historical methods foreseen in technologies-yet-to-come, Stryker argues that these documents hold the key not just to a million revelatory microhistories, but to the hitherto-hidden subaltern strata of shipping, and the unseen sinews of global empire: the people, ships, and journeys which defined imperial power. In the second paper, the session moves from a consideration of the historical documentation that undergirds maritime microhistories to examination of a specific museum ship: the Schooner Sultana, a careful reconstruction of a Boston-built original, launched in 1767. A small, ordinary working type, it was taken into the Royal Navy as an exigency, and used for customs enforcement on the Eastern Seaboard during the period of the Townshend Duties. Owned and operated since 2000 by the Sultana Education Foundation, the schooner, maritime historian Phillip Reid argues, offers the closest thing possible to the experience of a ubiquitous eighteenth-century working craft. Exceptionally well-documented and painstakingly reconstruction, the schooner provides both scholars and the public an unusual entree into the working life of eighteenth-century British America. In the session’s final paper, global historians Boyd Cothran and Adrian Shubert uncover the long history of efforts in New Zealand to first restore and ultimate to preserve the remains of the Edwin Fox, an average work-a-day merchant vessel built in Calcutta in 1853 and whose extraordinary career spanning over five decades provides rich and colourful opportunities for telling the story of nineteenth century globalization as it unfurled from the deck of a single ship as well as many interpretative challenges and pitfalls.