Why Does Naval History Matter? As a student of history, I have often met with the question ‘but why does history matter?’ Naval history, a specialised and unique branch of academic study, is met with a stronger question about its relevance, even amongst historians, being dismissed as simply ships, scurvy and sea dogs. Naval history […]
Why Does Naval History Matter? The first question to consider before approaching a response to why naval history matters is: why does any history matter? Before the professionalization of the field in the nineteenth century, the answer to this question seemed fairly obvious; historians “took it for granted that history furnished the basis for a […]
This is a new “table of contents” for the blog. I posted one of these a little more than a year ago, and it was time to update it! You may find this useful to bookmark, or share with someone unfamiliar with the blog. 2016 has been a great year for guest posts and new […]
I’m delighted to introduce the Coastal History blog’s fifth guest post (and the third guest post in the last twelve months!). Elsa Devienne is a Fellow at the Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities. She also holds a position as ‘maîtresse de conferences’ in the department of American studies at Université Paris […]
In my last post, I discussed problems of scale. How can we visualize (and discuss) ocean-sized problems from our modest vantage point? Is the “oceanic selfie” a path to a higher level of consciousness, or an anthropocentric dead end? When that post went online, I was in Hawaii and had just finished a couple […]
In my last post, I discussed why sea blindness is not the most useful way to characterize twenty-first century sensibilities. Let’s face it, it just doesn’t make much sense at a time when beachgoers have to be warned, “Don’t take selfies with seals.” Instead, I argued, we should think critically about sea visibility, which is […]
