NASOH #018 - James Lindgren, Preserving Maritime America: Mystic Seaport
The third of six parts of our interview with James Lindgren, an Honorable Mention in this year's John Lyman Prize, his book Preserving Maritime America looks at six maritime museums. In this episode we discuss Mystic Seaport. The United States has long been dependent on the seas, but Americans know little about their maritime history. While Britain and other countries have established national museums to nurture their seagoing traditions, America has left that responsibility to private institutions. In this first-of-its-kind history, James M. Lindgren focuses on a half-dozen of these great museums, ranging from Salem’s East India Marine Society, founded in 1799, to San Francisco’s Maritime Museum and New York’s South Street Seaport Museum, which were established in recent decades. Begun by activists with unique agendas—whether overseas empire, economic redevelopment, or cultural preservation—these museums have displayed the nation’s complex interrelationship with the sea. Yet they all faced chronic shortfalls, as policymakers, corporations, and everyday citizens failed to appreciate the oceans’ formative environment. Preserving Maritime America shows how these institutions shifted course to remain solvent and relevant and demonstrates how their stories tell of the nation’s rise and decline as a commercial maritime power. Dr. James Lindgren: https://www.plattsburgh.edu/academics/schools/arts-sciences/history/faculty/lindgren.html Preserving Maritime America: A Cultural History of the Nation's Great Maritime Museums https://www.bibliovault.org/BV.book.epl?ISBN=9781625344632 Mystic Seaport https://www.mysticseaport.org/ Mystic Seaport Museum is the nation’s leading maritime museum. Founded in 1929 to gather and preserve the rapidly disappearing artifacts of America’s seafaring past, the Museum has grown to become a national center for research and education with the mission to “inspire an enduring connection to the American maritime experience.” The Mystic Seaport Museum grounds cover 19 acres on the Mystic River in Mystic, CT and include a recreated New England coastal village, a working shipyard, formal exhibit halls, and state-of-the-art artifact storage facilities. The Museum is home to more than 500 historic watercraft, including four National Historic Landmark vessels, most notably the 1841 whaleship Charles W. Morgan, America’s oldest commercial ship still in existence. A stroll through the historic village enables visitors to experience firsthand from staff historians, storytellers, musicians, and craftspeople just what life was like to earn one’s living from the sea. In the Henry B. duPont Preservation Shipyard, they can watch shipwrights keeping the skills and techniques of traditional shipbuilding alive as they restore and maintain the Museum’s watercraft collection and other vessels. The Museum’s 41,000 square-foot Collections Research Center (CRC) offers exceptional physical and electronic access to the more than 2 million artifacts. The collections range from marine paintings, scrimshaw, models, tools, ships plans, an oral history archive, extensive film and video recordings, and more than 1 million photographs—including the incomparable Rosenfeld Collection. The CRC is also home to the G.W. Blunt White Library, a 75,000-volume research library where scholars from around the world come to study America’s maritime history.
