Pirates have many names—freebooters, brethren of the coast, members of the company, buccaneers. Throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, thousands of pirates stalked the seas, attacking merchant vessels trading in the West Indies, West Africa, and North America. This period of violence and thievery has been well documented and immortalized as the ‘Golden […]
January saw the University of Sussex host the ‘Seen But Not Heard?’ conference which sought to bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines who have a shared interest in the histories of childhood and youth. The conference considered youth in a variety of emotional, spatial, and material sites from antiquity to modernity. The […]
‘Sailortown’ is often described as a liminal space, the border between land and sea, work and home. Writing in 1923, C. Fox Smith highlighted this with ‘Dockland, strictly speaking, is of no country—or rather it is of all countries.’[1] There are few places where one can see the rise and fall of this phenomenon so […]
Although many thousands of British evacuees were evacuated by steam train during the Second World War, others travelled to their new homes by steam ship. George Osborn recalled the excitement of his journey from Portsmouth to the Isle of Wight: The great engines, powered by steam from the coal-fired boiler, slowly turned the […]
Though historians have begun to reassess the extent of anti-German feeling in Britain in the years preceding the outbreak of the First World War, it is nevertheless interesting to take note of an incident where a Russian naval blunder became the site of Anglo-German antagonism.[1] Taking place in the thick of the Russo-Japanese War, the […]
The opening of the Jutland exhibition coincides with the one hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Jutland, which was fought from 31 May to 1 June 1916, and has been commemorated locally and at a wider level.[1] The focus of the exhibition is upon an intense moment of British naval history; 36 hours of warfare […]
