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The Coastal History Blog 26: “Conference report: Charles Dibdin and his World”

Over Thanksgiving, I had the privilege to participate in what was apparently the first ever conference devoted to Charles Dibdin the Elder (1745-1814).  In what follows, I will not reproduce information easily enough discovered on the conference website, nor will I suggest that the conference reached a consensus (it did not).  There were some shared […]

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The Coastal History Blog 24: “Port Geography at the Crossroads”

Cloistered subfields predictably produce cloistered scholarship. Cloistered scholarship is, as a rule, quite dull.  Why, then, does cloistering exercise such a fatal attraction for so many academics? A new article in the Journal of Transport Geography confronts this dilemma in an unusually honest way.  “Port Geography at the Crossroads”—co-authored by nine academics based variously in […]

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The Coastal History Blog 22: “The Trained Researcher’s Eye… and What It Misses”

Many historians, young and old, nurse the lingering hope that their next round of research will uncover that career-making revelation, their personal equivalent of Carlo Ginzburg’s benandanti or Robert Darnton’s Great Cat Massacre. But if it turned up right in front of you, would you notice it?  Don’t be so sure. Consider the sad case […]

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