Author Archive | Isaac Land

Fresh and Salt front cover lo res

The Coastal History Blog No.52: The Fresh and the Salt – Ann Lingard’s Solway

The Solway—originally sol + wath, the muddy ford—forms part of the border region between England and Scotland.[1] Its precise boundaries have vexed lawyers at times, “for the channels and sandbanks can change even within a day,” but perhaps two other descriptions can fill out the picture: it is “the most under-researched estuary in the UK” […]

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Vittore Carpaccio, “Hunting on the lagoon,” ca. 1490. [Getty Museum: public domain image] According to the Getty’s caption, these Venetian archers “use clay pellets rather than arrows in order to stun the birds and not damage their plumage.”

The Coastal History Blog No.50: Catching a Wave – Seven Years of the Coastal History Blog

Most academic blogs are about an individual researcher’s particular work and interests. What I sought to do here, instead, was to use the blog as a placeholder or “proof of concept” for a possible journal and for a new network of professionals. This, necessarily, meant that I frequently read, and wrote, outside my comfort zone, […]

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Drawing of steam paddle boat

The Coastal History Blog 47: Elevated Waterfronts: Bird’s-Eye View Maps and Urban Coastal History

Today’s guest post is from Sean Fraga, who recently received his Ph.D. in History from Princeton University, where he is currently a postgraduate research associate with the Center for Digital Humanities and the Department of History. Here, he discusses the genre (and rhetoric) of bird’s-eye view maps.  Reconstructing how the different pieces of an urban […]

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Gotham City - a representation of coastal history

The Coastal History Blog 45: Crime Alley? Port Cities and Batman’s Gotham

I’m delighted to introduce our seventh guest post, by Madison Heslop.  She is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Washington.  While there is a well-known and rich literature on “the idea of the city” or “the image of the city,” there’s a surprising shortage of smart, thoughtful pieces on where waterfronts and […]

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