Better Woke than Broken

History in the Cause of a Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive World

Most discussions about diversity, equity, and inclusion ignore a salient fact: Investing effort in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives is an antidote to civic, intellectual, and emotional laziness.

To engage with marginalized groups and individuals requires that we ask hard questions about the past and take risks to get the answers. While critics wield “woke” as a verbal cudgel to slam the acknowledgement of people whose contributions to the world have been ignored out of simple prejudice, most of us don’t want to sleepwalk through life. This is especially true of historians.

Last month I was honored to announce the winners of the John R. Lyman Book Awards in maritime history at the annual conference of the North American Society for Ocean History (NASOH) in Natchez. In my introductory remarks, I joked that we might find the diversity, equity, and inclusion police after us because eight of the 2024 honorees are women. These included Randy Carol Goguen and Abigail Mullen, both of whom won in the North American Naval History category, African American Mary Hicks, and Li Tana, a Chinese-born Australian scholar of Southeast Asia.¹

As potentially offensive to the anti-woke crowd, three of the books treated different aspects of the slave trade: Hicks’s Captive Cosmopolitans, in World Maritime History; Jane Webster’s Materializing the Middle Passage: A Historical Archaeology of British Slave Shipping, 1680–1807, in Maritime and Nautical Archaeology; and Jeff Forret’s The Price They Paid: Slavery, Shipwrecks, and Reparations Before the Civil War, in North American Maritime History. Forret’s book examines not reparations paid to the formerly enslaved (no national government has paid any) but the US government’s two-decade effort to get the British government to compensate American slaveowners whose human “property” had been automatically freed upon landing on British soil.²

In addition, Andrew Lipman’s Squanto: A Native Odyssey considers the upbringing and transatlantic peregrinations of the man credited with saving the Pilgrims but who is usually rendered as a two-dimensional cutout. This is one of many recent scholarly works to have explored the previously overlooked travels of thousands of Native Americans to Europe starting in the fifteenth century. Finally, there was Daniel Macfarlane’s The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History, which assesses maritime and other activities on the smallest and most polluted of the Great Lakes.

To be sure, there were plenty of books to whet the appetite of the most heave-ho traditionalist: on Americans’ determination to navigate the Spanish-controlled Mississippi in the 1790s, the Tripolitan War, the Civil War, an obscure but significant chapter in the development of naval engineering and its consequences for the US Navy in the Pacific theater of World War II, the unheralded naval campaign in the English Channel that lasted from before D-Day until the fall of Le Havre three months later, Aristotle Onassis, one of the most consequential shipping magnates of the twentieth century, and the Cold War in the Western Pacific.

That women swept the North American Naval History category was obvious immediately, but none of the committee members (four women and three men) registered how many women honorees there were overall—nor the number of titles that touched on human enslavement—until after the fact. The reason is that the committee judges the merit of books within, not across, the eight categories in which awards are made.

No one working in maritime history would find anything unusual about such a preponderance of women honorees, although all would agree that the field has traditionally been viewed as a subject about and for men and it has taken time for women to break into the profession. When the idea for NASOH was first floated at a conference at the University of Maine in Orono in 1973, a total of seventy-seven people registered, nine of them women. Six registered as spouses—Mrs. John Lyman and the like—and only three had any academic or professional affiliation. One was an undergrad and another a grad student.³

The sole woman among the twenty presenters was Judith Joye, whose credentials were unusual for anyone at the time. She was not an academic, but worked in underwater salvage, participated in diving expeditions, and in 1962 was the first woman certified by the US Navy in buoyant submarine escape. Her topic was the law of the sea as it pertained to seabed resources, a subject of particular interest to those negotiating what became the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982.⁴

By contrast, more than a third of the registrants at the NASOH meeting last month were women, almost all of them panel chairs or presenters, including a high school student from Michigan. With respect to this year’s Lyman Awards, women punched above their weight. Of the 126 authors and editors of the 118 books submitted for consideration, only 25 (20 percent) were women, but they represented 53 percent of the honorees. Since the awards were initiated in 1995, there have been forty-eight women honorees (three of whom have won twice)—twelve in the first fifteen years, but three times that in the fourteen years since.

Women bring different perspectives, strengths, and, occasionally, interests to whatever field they’re in, but they have often faced inane opposition from people for whom the unexamined life seems the acme of personal achievement. Twenty years ago, a male trustee of a major American maritime museum resigned to protest the appointment of a woman as executive director because, he said, women could not run maritime museums.

Today, the executive director of the International Council of Maritime Museums and the executive director of the National Maritime Historical Society—to cite two of many examples—are Kristen Greenaway and Cathy Green, respectively. Greenaway is also president of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, and Green previously headed the Wisconsin Maritime Museum.

Just as men have always written about men’s contributions to maritime enterprise, many women have done important work to uncover the diverse roles of women in maritime history, like two-time Lyman winner Kathleen Broome Williams in Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in World War II and Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea, and Lisa Norling with Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720–1870.⁵

Like their male peers, women historians are just as likely to write about non-gendered subjects, like two-time Lyman honorees Nancy Shoemaker, who wrote Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles: Americans in Nineteenth-Century Fiji and compiled Living With Whales: Documents and Oral Histories of Native New England Whaling History, and Jennifer Hubbard, author of A Science on the Scales: The Rise of Canadian Atlantic Fisheries Biology, 1898–1939 and A Century of Maritime Science: The St. Andrews Biological Station, co-authored by David J. Wildish and Robert L. Stephenson. (Hubbard is also a member of the Lyman Book Awards committee.)

As to the effort required to investigate subjects that fall under the rubric of diversity, equity, and inclusion…. People and societies alike tend to be lazy. This can be seen in the books that writers write, publishers publish, and readers read. Years ago, the British publisher Jonathan Cape admonished budding authors: “Always write a book about Nelson. Never write a book about South America.” More than a few have followed his advice. According to the WorldCat online network of library databases, Admiral Lord Nelson, hero of the battle of Trafalgar, during which he died 220 years ago, is the subject of 1,629 books.

Nelson is by no means the most popular individual maritime subject. Christopher Columbus rates 9,017 books. Such a high number makes sense because, whatever one’s opinion of him, his actions were vastly more consequential for the world than Nelson’s, and he’s been dead more than twice as long.

Another mainstay of the publishing industry is the Titanic, the subject of 4,587 books and counting, an enduring popularity even writers about the doomed ocean liner have trouble explaining. To be clear, Nelson and the Titanic are not famous simply for being famous. Nelson’s victories helped pave the way for Great Britain’s global domination in the nineteenth century, when the sun never sank on its sprawling empire, and the loss of the Titanic shattered public complacency about technological progress and the inequities of the Gilded Age. Writers and publishers are only human, however, and many churn out books as much to entertain and cash in on popular subjects as to add to the sum of human knowledge.

This diversion of talent and brainpower is not without consequences, because it keeps us from work that can shine light on the past while also illuminating the present and offering glimpses of paths to the future. The Atlantic slave trade, which lasted nearly four centuries, is perhaps the best example of a topic that historians have almost studiously avoided. WorldCat records only 172 books on the subject.

To consider these numbers another way, there are more than 1,600 books on one British admiral and more than 2 books for every person aboard the Titanic, but only 1 book for every 70,000 of the roughly 12 million enslaved people carried wrenched from Africa to the Americas. Equally striking is that more than 40 percent of the latter titles have appeared in the last decade, a period that happens to coincide with a global rise in calls for all aspects of society to be more inclusive, equitable, and accessible even as self-styled conservatives in the United States and elsewhere began shrieking about the “evils” of diversity.

There are various explanations for these glaring discrepancies, not the least of which is the tragic anonymity of all but a tiny handful of victims of the slave trade and the concomitant lack of sources about the experiences of specific people. Indeed, a lot of work about the slave trade treats not individuals but trends, and the starting point for much recent work has been the development of the SlaveVoyages.org, a collaborative online database decades in the making.

This is not to suggest that authors of books on the slave trade are simply exploiting a popular trend. To do so ignores the painstaking research across multiple archives in different countries, as well as the often emotionally taxing labor that goes into putting these histories on the page. (Notwithstanding twittish claims about empathy being “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization,” empathy—the process of understanding others, not pitying them, which is sympathy—is an essential part of the historian’s toolkit.)

Women historians, the slave trade, maritime labor, Native American maritime enterprise, the environment—all are essential parts of the complex that is the history of maritime enterprise. So, too, are issues of sexuality and gender, which just this week have threatened to upend the McMullen Naval History Symposium, a biennial conference held at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. John Hattendorf, dean of American (if not world) naval historians, has described McMullen as the “largest regular meeting of naval historians in the world” and the U.S. Navy’s “single most important interaction with [an] academic historical audience.”

This year’s McMullen Symposium has garnered unwelcome attention because officials directed the Naval Academy’s history department to rescind the acceptance of a paper “for reasons having nothing to do with scholarship,” as Tom McCarthy wrote in a letter resigning as chair of the department. While there has been no official announcement about the author or the paper’s subject, people familiar with the issue say it deals with issues of gender and sexuality among sailors.

The reputational harm to the Naval Academy from its decision to cancel an academic paper because of the current administration’s fear of homosexuality, among many other bugaboos, is significant, especially as it comes in the wake of the Academy’s removal of 381 books from its library on the grounds that they were there only because of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. This left the Nimitz Library in the embarrassing position of censoring Maya Angelou for her 1969 autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which ends with the birth of her son when she was seventeen, while leaving in circulation Adolph Hitler’s antisemitic, autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf, which ends with the murder of six million Jews.⁶

If banning books, micromanaging academic conferences, and complaining about the wrong people either doing or being the subject of history seems childish, it is. These actions combine the worst traits of a four year old whose imaginary world you disrupt to tantrums and tears with the pubescent viciousness of middle-school cliques.

We cannot ignore the dangers posed by the efforts of emotionally broken politicians to concoct exclusionary fantasy worlds. As we have seen repeatedly over the past five months, reality intrudes with ever more violent and existential consequences. Restoring a worldview based on frank and fact-based assessments of our past and present requires industry and endurance. Thankfully, these are among the historian’s great strengths.

1. For details on winners of the John R. Lyman Awards in maritime history for 2024, visit https://nasoh.org/2024-lyman-award-winners.

2. When Parliament abolished slavery in the British Empire, they authorized compensation of £20 million (equal to more than $4 billion in 2025) to former enslavers. To help pay for this, the government borrowed £15 million, a debt they carried until 2015.

3. The “Directory of Participants” is published in the front matter of 1973 Seminar in Maritime and Regional Studies, University of Maine at Orono, edited by Clark G. Reynolds and William J. McAndrew (Maine Sea Grant Bulletin 6, University of Maine Press, 1974), available at https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/40328.

4. Deepsea mining is once again in the news thanks to President Trump’s April 24 executive order authorizing the extraction of seabed resources, in contravention of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

5. A list of all Lyman honorees since 1995 is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lyman_Book_Awards.

6. All but about twenty of the removed books were later reshelved. Those still withheld have not been identified.