The Coastal History Blog 40: Three Years of the Coastal History Blog

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 coastal history friends.  The readership figures have set new records repeatedly over the last 15 months.

2016 was also notable for the first ever coastal history conference, organized by David Worthington (@WorthingtonD) in Dornoch, Scotland.  An edited volume is in the works.  David invited me to guest blog for him afterwards and this short piece may be helpful to newcomers: Coastal History: Who, What, and Why?  David’s website, Firths and Fjords, has rapidly emerged as an important coastal history blog in its own right, with numerous interdisciplinary guest posts.

2016 also featured the publication of Port Towns and Urban Cultures: International Histories of the Waterfront, c. 1700-2000, edited by Brad Beaven, Rob James, and Karl Bell.  This volume came out of PTUC’s 2013 conference.  My chapter, “Doing Urban History in the Coastal Zone,” incorporates a number of themes first discussed in this blog and offers a more systematic framework going forward.  The Foreshore-Offshore-Estuary framework that I propose in that chapter is intentionally flexible and may be helpful for coastal inquiries that are not exclusively urban, or are not urban at all.

Also this year, I published a chapter, “The Tolerant Coast,” in Charlotte Mathieson’s edited volume, Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present.

Here is the complete list of blog posts.  As before, they are listed not thematically, but in order of appearance.

What Is the “Coast” in Coastal History?

What Makes Coastal History Distinct? (part 1 of 2)

What Makes Coastal History Distinct? (part 2 of 2)

Are Islands Insular?

What Are Beaches For?

The Political Economy of Sand

The Tolerant Coast

Rivers of the Anthropocene

Coasts of the Anthropocene

Crossing the Bay of Bengal

Women in Port

Women as Tavern Keepers

Gérard Le Bouedec’s sociétés littorales  

On Serendipity in Research

Imperial Russia Salutes its Navy (Julia Leikin guest post)

The Pious Coast

Iain McCalman’s Great Barrier Reef

Offshore and Offshoring

The Versatile Coast

Contemplating Time and Tide in the Sailor’s Magazine

The Cosmopolitan Port Town—Is There Any Other Kind?

Trained Researcher’s Eye… and What It Misses

Sailors on Bicycles

Port Geography at the Crossroads

The Encroaching Coast

Dibdin conference report

The Sailor’s Yarn

Jews and Muslims in Twentieth-Century France: The View from a Port Town

Are Islands Natural Prisons? (Katy Roscoe guest post)

Maritime Heritage and Social Justice

New Scholarship on the Press Gang part 1

New Scholarship on the Press Gang part 2

The Intolerant Coast  

Two Years of the Coastal History Blog

Firths and Fjords (David Worthington guest post)

A Pacific Blackbirding Narrative (Karin Speedy guest post)

A Cosmopolitan Bronze Age Port?

Sea Blindness, or Ocean Optimism? (part 1 of 3)

Sea Blindness, or Ocean Optimism? (part 2 of 3) A Tale of Four Tweets

Sea Blindness, or Ocean Optimism? (part 3 of 3) Epiphany among the Manta Rays

Beneath the Pavement—The Beach! (Elsa Devienne guest post on Urban Beaches Workshop at the University of London)

I am indebted to the PTUC team for hosting, to my guest bloggers, and to allies like Jo Atherton (@FlotsamWeaving), Derya Akkaynak (@dakkaynak), and Ann Lingard (@solwaywalker).

2017 promises to be an even better year, with more conferences, more outreach, more guest posts, and—as ever—an eclectic set of topics.

Thank you for reading, and remember that simply including the right keywords in your article or abstract—or using #coastalhistory and #coastalstudies hashtags on social media—will help scholars, artists, and kindred spirits find each other.  A growing number of people are including the #coastalhistory tag in their Twitter user profile.  This, too, is clickable, so you are offering people unfamiliar with the term a gateway to other users.

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