Tag Archives | sailors

Port towns

New: Port Towns & Urban Cultures Edited Book

Port Towns & Urban Cultures: International Histories of the Waterfront, c.1700 – 2000, Eds. Brad Beaven, Karl Bell and Robert James, (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2016) Despite the port’s prominence in maritime history, its cultural significance has long been neglected in favour of its role within economic and imperial networks. Defined by their intersection of maritime […]

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players

Call for Papers: Maritime Masculinities, 1815-1940

Maritime Masculinities, 1815-1940 19th- 20th December, 2016, Oxford, UK Keynote speakers include: Dr Mary Conley, College of the Holy Cross, USA Prof. Joanne Begiato,  Oxford Brookes University Dr Isaac Land, Indiana State University, USA The Department of History, Philosophy & Religion, Oxford Brookes University, and the Port Towns and Urban Cultures group, University of Portsmouth, invite […]

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Beer

British Sailors and Prohibition: the experience of going “dry” in the USA during the Empire Cruise

Despite the cleansing of the sailor image during the late Victorian era, many contemporaries viewed sailors’ predilection for drink as a worrying problem.[1] In particular, Agnes Weston used the image of a drunken sailor riding a barrel to make her case for the temperance movement, although this portrayal was condemned by sailors.[2] Yet, the image […]

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Gibbet2

Dead Men Telling Tales: Maritime Gibbet Lore in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture

The practice of gibbeting, also known more specifically as hanging in irons, or hanging in chains, was a particularly macabre punishment for a variety of convicted felons, and yet it is the image of the pirate cadaver swinging eerily in the breeze, which appears to have become most engrained in popular culture since the eighteenth […]

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Thomas_Trotter_Orme

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 […]

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