The topic for this year’s National History Day is Frontiers. In American history, the term usually elicits an image of covered wagons, cowboys, and Native Americans – when the colonists moved West. But Frontiers has a much broader meaning. Learn how to use the Steamship Historical Society’s materials to research frontiers in exploration, colonization, technological advancements, politics, immigration, and race.
If you have a topic for National History Day related to steamships, email us at info@sshsa.org to visit the archives and learn more about finding materials in our collections. Here are a few jumping off points for research.
Steamships have provided the power and speed to move people and goods across the world in a safer, more reliable, and efficient way of travel. But they have also been used to explore other lands and, in some cases, colonize or exploit the natural resources of other countries. Take the history of bananas and the United Fruit Company for example. Known throughout Latin America as “El Pulpo,” the United Fruit Company trafficked in bananas and backed dictatorships to secure land to maintain its near monopoly in the banana trade. Clearing rainforests, these plantations had little biodiversity and disease quickly spread. In the 1910s, the company abandoned those plantations leaving workers jobless. The company also destroyed all infrastructure it had created (telephone lines, bridges, railroads, etc.) with each relocation. Every time the company moved from the Panama diseased land, it cleared additional rainforests in Central America to start over. In the 1930s, the company owned over 40% of the Guatemala’s arable land at one point. With the help of the U.S. Government and the CIA, in 1954, the United Fruit orchestrated the overthrow of Arbenz, a democratically elected President in Guatemala, for example, who tried to buy back land from the company. That same year in Honduras, thousands of United Fruit workers went on strike until the company finally recognized a new labor union.
Another frontier in history that steamships made possible was in technology. It goes without saying that steamships created connections around the world, providing goods and the transportation of people in a reliable and faster way than sailing vessels had in the past. But steamships also enabled advancements in communication – like the laying of the transatlantic telegraph cables. You can read more about that in our lesson from Telegraph to Text: How Undersea Cables Connect Us All.
In terms of political frontiers, you can research the Black Star Line. The Black Star Line was a steamship company completely owned, operated, and financed by people of African descent. Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), a Jamaican national and master propagandist, was the leader of this venture. He was a black nationalist and a leader of the pan-Africanism movement, which sought to unify and connect people of African descent worldwide. As the head of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), he told members in 1921, that “If you want liberty you yourselves must strike the blow. If you must be free, you must become so through your own effort … Until you produce what the white man has produced you will not be his equal.”
Garvey saw the Black Star Line as the solution to the black community’s problems–a company completely owned, operated, and financed by black people would create pride, free up economic dependency on the white community, and create a strong economic base in the only independent nation in West Africa, Liberia. Like Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Marcus Garvey felt that economic development for black people would allow for social and political advancement. You can read the lesson on the Black Star Line and see more primary sources here.
Steamships also played a major role in immigration to the United States. You can learn more about Italian Immigration in the lesson Italian Immigration to Providence. Students can also research WWII refugees by reading our blog post Fleeing the Holocaust by Steamship. Check out our Immigration Module where you can find links to resources on conducting genealogy research, our SHIPS program oral histories on immigration, and an article on the historical context of immigration by steamship with additional resources listed at the end.
Additional Resources:
Ted-Ed Video and Lesson – The Dark History of Bananas