Reviews
Mastering the Inland Seas: How Lighthouses, Navigational Aids, and Harbors Transformed the Great Lakes and America by Theodore J. Karamanski (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 2020, 368pp, illus, notes, biblio, index, isbn 9780-299-32630-2; $36.95hc) Mastering the Inland Seas is the latest contribution to midwestern regional history by the pioneering public historian Theodore Karamanski. Known by maritime historians for his 2001 volume, Schooner Passage: Sailing Ships and the Lake Michigan Frontier, Karamanski has written and cowritten many books on midwestern topics, such as the fur trade, logging, and the Civil War, as well as dozens of scholarly articles and technical historic preservation documents. No midwestern historian has done more to break down the barriers between scholarly and public history than Karamanski. His latest volume is the outgrowth of a contract research project on navigational aids commissioned by the Midwestern Regional Office of the National Park Service. It provides a useful new reference for historic preservationists needing historical context for coastal and maritime properties such as lighthouses, harbors, and coastal industrial sites. The book covers a vast sweep of Great Lakes history from indigenous maritime activities through the contemporary challenges of natural and historic preservation.
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The book’s chief contribution is its focus on maritime infrastructure and the federal government’s role in shaping and reshaping the Great Lakes during the 19th and 20th centuries. In recent decades, scholars have transformed our understanding of the federal government’s reach and processes in antebellum America. Through activities such as delivering mail, seizing and distributing indigenous lands, military campaigns, subsidizing or constructing public and private infrastructure, the federal government directly shaped the American nation and organization of daily life. The US government’s involvement in developing local maritime infrastructure began when Congress passed, after contentious debate, the Lighthouse Act of 1789. Because maritime activities moved between state and national boundaries and beyond, navigation-related infrastructure and regulation fell within the area of federal responsibilities. Building and maintaining lighthouses, charting coastal waters, and steamboat safety became widely, but not universally, recognized as legitimate duties of the federal government. The politics of federal involvement in maritime infrastructure grew more acrimonious and increasingly sectional in the decades leading up to the Civil War, a period Karamanski covers in chapter three, “The Era of Bad Feelings.” These “bad feelings” became incendiary by the time of
President Polk’s surprise veto of the muchanticipated Rivers and Harbors Bill of 1846, a move strongly supported by Southern congressmen. The vote, Karamanski writes, “awoke the nascent political consciousness of the Old Northwest region, solidified the region’s political-economic relationship with the Northeast, and sundered much of the goodwill and cooperation that had existed between the West and South.” The continuing political controversies over navigation became a principal catalyst for the rise of the Republican Party. While much of the history included in Mastering the Inland Seas is well known to Great Lakes scholars, its inclusion is essential for the non-specialists seeking to gain a broader understanding of the region or engage in lakes-related historic preservation. For general readers interested in lighthouses and other aids to navigation, the book provides a useful introduction to the history of aids to navigation technology, including lighthouses, charts, and coastal pilot books. Later chapters describe the development of improved buoys, the adoption of electronic navigation technologies on the Great Lakes, and modern weather forecasting. Karamanski understands the broad sweep of Great Lakes regional history as well as anyone writing today. Throughout the book, Karamanski argues that the larger transformation of the Great Lakes from a maritime frontier to North SEA HISTORY 173, WINTER 2020–21