The Solway—originally sol + wath, the muddy ford—forms part of the border region between England and Scotland.[1] Its precise boundaries have vexed lawyers at times, “for the channels and sandbanks can change even within a day,” but perhaps two other descriptions can fill out the picture: it is “the most under-researched estuary in the UK” […]
![Vittore Carpaccio, “Hunting on the lagoon,” ca. 1490. [Getty Museum: public domain image] According to the Getty’s caption, these Venetian archers “use clay pellets rather than arrows in order to stun the birds and not damage their plumage.”](https://porttowns.port.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Vittore-Carpaccio_Hunting-on-the-lagoon_c1490-scaled-100x100.jpg "The Coastal History Blog No.50: Catching a Wave – Seven Years of the Coastal History Blog")
Most academic blogs are about an individual researcher’s particular work and interests. What I sought to do here, instead, was to use the blog as a placeholder or “proof of concept” for a possible journal and for a new network of professionals. This, necessarily, meant that I frequently read, and wrote, outside my comfort zone, […]
My inter-library loan office is getting suspicious. I guess I should rephrase that; they got suspicious back in 2013, though they seem to have forgiven me since then. What set them off was my request for Patrik Alac’s The Bikini: A Cultural History. It was dutifully produced at the circulation desk, but I received an […]
Today’s guest post is from Sean Fraga, who recently received his Ph.D. in History from Princeton University, where he is currently a postgraduate research associate with the Center for Digital Humanities and the Department of History. Here, he discusses the genre (and rhetoric) of bird’s-eye view maps. Reconstructing how the different pieces of an urban […]
It’s easy to bury New York City underneath a list of superlatives. On this visit, my Airbnb was in Astoria, offering me the refreshing, if fleeting, experience of living in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Congressional district. On a Saturday night, I took the 7 train out to Queens Night Market. The Night Market is something like a […]
I’m delighted to introduce our seventh guest post, by Madison Heslop. She is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Washington. While there is a well-known and rich literature on “the idea of the city” or “the image of the city,” there’s a surprising shortage of smart, thoughtful pieces on where waterfronts and […]
