I started this blog in October 2013. I would like to thank the Port Towns and Urban Cultures group for continuing to host it! It might be a good time to look back and consider the range of themes and topics that have come across these pages so far. There wasn’t a single, convenient web […]
Tag Archives | isaac land
The Coastal History Blog 31: “The Intolerant Coast”
The Syrian refugee crisis has brought forth a broad humanitarian response and also some thoughtful pieces from historians. On the “refugee or migrant” question, Le Monde interviewed Gérard Noiriel in a conversation that harked back all the way to the sixteenth century.[1] In the Guardian, Mary Beard commented on how the Roman Empire handled borders […]
New Scholarship on the Press Gang – Part 2 of 2
In The Myth of the Press Gang, J. Ross Dancy offers a quantitative approach to the subject. He developed a sampling system and entered the details as recorded in individual ships’ muster books covering the period 1793-1801. Data entry took twenty two weeks. The end result was a database including 27,174 individuals, “roughly a 10 […]
The Coastal History Blog 30: “Maritime Heritage and Social Justice”
In May, I participated in a conference in Bordeaux, Self, other and elsewhere: Images and imaginaries of the port cities of Atlantic and Mediterranean Europe (1700-present). [1] One particularly animated panel on the second day, “The taboo of the trade,” concerned how French ports such as Nantes and Bordeaux itself were coming to terms with […]
The Coastal History Blog 28: New Scholarship on the Press Gang
In the first of a two part series, this month Isaac offers a web-essay exploring ‘New Scholarship on the Press Gang.’ “When I undertook a PhD project on sailors back in 1993, work on impressment per se was scarce. One of the more memorable works had been published in 1913. The secondary literature that is available […]
New Scholarship on the Press Gang – Part 1 of 2
When I undertook a PhD project on sailors back in 1993, work on impressment per se was scarce. One of the more memorable works had been published in 1913. [1] The secondary literature that is available now amounts to an Aladdin’s Cave of riches compared to what I had to work with two decades ago. […]
