International Journal of Naval History

Editorial

December 2003 - April 2004

Gary E. Weir, 

for the editors of the IJNH

            With this issue we conclude our first full year of publication and the second year of our existence. All of us at the IJNH would like to thank those who have contributed scholarship, news, notes, and reviews as well as those of you around the world who come to the IJNH for insights into naval history.

          We delayed the appearance of the December issue for two reasons. First, we had some technical difficulty with our web service provider that required some upgrades and caused a delay in our upload.  Secondly we wanted to take advantage of an opportunity to publish the papers emerging from the Symposium on John Ericsson and the Revolution in Naval Warfare 1850-1880 hosted by Swedish National Defense College in Stockholm on 14 November 2003. Thanks to permission received from the National Defense College and the generosity of the participants we have papers by Professor Jan Glete, Professor Andrew Lambert, and Mr. Howard Fuller to offer in this issue. This is the first time for Professors Glete and Lambert in our pages and we would like to welcome them.

         Since the postponement of the December issue ran so long, we decided to publish a combined December-April issue, to bring to you as much scholarship as possible, to keep our news items current, and to avoid delaying the appearance of our book reviews. We also have some scholarship still in review that will come back to us before April. When those items are properly reviewed I shall add them to this issue. The editors would like to thank you for your patience.

          To complement the scholarship on Nineteenth Century naval technology and John Ericsson we asked Howard Fuller and Robert Schneller to prepare articles on John Dahlgren's contribution to naval ordnance. The editors felt that combining the scholarship on Ericsson and Dahlgren in a single issue would highlight the contribution of Sweden to the development of modern navies and provide interesting depth on a technical subject of interest to those historically involved in the period punctuated by the American Civil War.

          I would also urge you to explore Howard Fuller's historical note on digital photographic techniques as they apply to historical research. My division of the Naval Historical Center has used both digital photography and digital audio recording to great effect and with significant economies of money and labor. The editors would also like to thank the Journal of Maritime Research for permission to republish this piece for our audience.  

          If you are well informed by what you read in these pages, please consider submitting an article for publication or sending your e-mail address to one of the book review editors so we can avail ourselves of your expertise. 

Thank you for visiting and using the IJNH.