Today, I’m happy to introduce The Coastal History blog’s first guest post. Julia Leikin is a Ph.D. candidate at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Recent events involving Russia and Ukraine have prompted many op-ed pieces and impromptu reflections on lessons from the past. Some commentators have drawn attention to Russia’s religious […]
I’m writing today in response to Glen O’Hara’s recent blog post, “What about the Silence in the Archive?” Glen visited the National Archives of the United States in search of American commentary on British water policy. The short version is that he discovered U.S. bureaucrats had a lot to say on everyone’s water policy (the […]
This weekend, I broke out the French dictionary and made my way—slowly—through an impressive article that belongs alongside Michael Pearson’s “Littoral Society: The Concept and the Problems,” and Danny Vickers’ book Young Men and the Sea. [1] At the Port Towns and Urban Cultures conference this past July, Oliver Le Gouic wrote down a name […]
Taverns and other drinking establishments occupy a privileged place in the iconography of ports and sailortowns. Who could forget the free-and-easy multicultural egalitarianism of ALL-MAX, the East End dive immortalized by Pierce Egan? [1] In The Many-Headed Hydra, Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh speculated about what sorts of conversations sailors, slaves, sex workers, and assorted […]
This will be the first of several posts about a promising new volume edited by Douglas Catterall and Jodi Campbell entitled Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500-1800. [1] Catterall and Campbell point out a familiar problem: “The iconic Atlantic-world figure is a traveler, explorer, or merchant, certainly […]
Sunil Amrith’s impressive new book, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants, captures the strengths of oceanic history, with its bold comparative and border-crossing sweep, but also remains attentive to the fine textures and variations of locality that I’ve argued should be a key feature of coastal history. […]
