Dr. Charles Travis

The historiographical significance of my project is to reframe the early oceanic dimensions and impact of whaling expeditions, oil, viscera and skeletal extractions, culture and commerce on the American maritime and global imagination during the expansion of the United States and emergence of the nation as a hemispheric and world power. My study is a humanities focused response to the United Nation"s Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development 2021"2030 initiative which declares mapping technologies will be at the core of a "true revolution in ocean science." I hope to visit the G. W. Blunt White Library at Mystic Seaport, where to study and source data from whale and weather logbooks, maritime charts and atlases, diaries, ship and company registers related to American whaling expeditions from the colonial period to 1900. This will help me to chart how whaling an oil extractions, production, commerce and capitalization intersected with the United States" westward expansion, the Civil War and the growth of the U.S. Navy, its oceanographic knowledge and global reach. Similarly, the collections of the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum hold logbooks, account books, diaries, printed ephemera, photo-albums, and photographs related to oceanic cultures and collections of maritime and natural history literature, which intersect with the growth of American hemispheric trade between 1800 and 1900. As my project links cartographic representation with environmental history and geospatial data, I am interested in exploring maritime map and atlas collections of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library.

Texas Portal to Texas History, Digital Fellowship

Irish Research Council Interdisciplinary Research