6th November – PTUC’s Dr Rob James will be giving a paper entitled “If there’s one man that I admire, that man’s a British tar”: The Navy, Identity and Leisure in Early-Twentieth Century Britain,” at the Greenwich Maritime Institute. GMI Research Seminar Series 2013–14 6th November – PTUC’s Dr Mike Esbester will be giving a […]
PTUC’s Brad Beaven and Louise Moon, alongside colleagues at the University of Gothenburg will be attending and delivering a session panel entitled “Work, leisure and living Mapping the Port Town, c. 1800-1950,” 8th – 10th May at the Sixth Swedish Historians Meeting held in Stockholm. This session will look at two European port towns – Gothenburg in […]
In his TV series The Shock of the New, the art historian Robert Hughes remarked that politicians don’t like port towns. They are too colorful and ungovernable. He made this statement while discussing Brazil’s decision to build a futuristic capital city from scratch. Brasilia, by implication, was a rejection of Rio de Janeiro. Next, Hughes […]
I just finished Lena Lenček and Gideon Bosker’s The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth. [1] There’s a lot to think about here, but the most intriguing part of the book for me was the discussion of how many well-known modern beach resorts were—in various senses—built on reclaimed land, and cannot survive in their […]
Most of my readers, like me, will be shivering in the hemisphere of cold, snow, and ice for the next few months. If only for relief, I thought this would be a good season to write about more summery themes. My next few postings will be about the modern beach. It’s been a while since […]
I’ve received a number of questions about islands this year. In response, I’m trying to catch up on the scholarship surrounding them. This will be an ongoing process, but today I can offer a progress report. Utopias and Lost Worlds In Eccentric Islands, the poet and travel writer Bill Holm celebrated offbeat destinations like Iceland […]
