International Journal of Naval History

Editorial

August - December 2004

Gary E. Weir

U.S. Naval Historical Center,

for the IJNH.

           In concluding our third year we once again find ourselves looking at a double issue. This seems an alternative we have had to use far too often, but circumstances made it the best way both to overcome difficulty and to get our scholarship out to IJNH readers in a prompt fashion. In this case, I became the victim of an incompetent computer network technician and lost far too much of the IJNH prepared for August to publish that issue on time. The War in Iraq has also pressed my office terribly, frequently calling us away to other important matters.  Thus I decided to combine August and December, to stay on time as a publication and to make available all of the ideas we currently have to offer.  None of the material originally intended for August disappeared due to the computer technician’s ineptitude. We have some particularly insightful book reviews to offer as well as Mark Connelly’s analysis of battleships and British society over a very significant forty-year period.

            In addition to our usual run of articles and book reviews, we now have the History of Oceanography Newsletter making a permanent home in the pages of the IJNH with its 2004 issue. The newsletter is prepared in association with the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science by Professor Eric Mills of Dalhousie University. This annual publication serves those historians who have an interest in the history of the ocean sciences in war and in peace. It provides community news, some publication reviews, and an incomparable annual bibliography prepared by Deborah Day, the archivist of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the University of California, San Diego. I strongly encourage all of our readers to examine this publication for both the primary content and for the amazing bibliography. Navies make little sense outside the context the Ocean provides.  Understanding that ocean from the historical perspective must form a critical part of naval history.