Isaac’s Coastal History blogs
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. […]
This posting follows close on the heels of the last one, which summarized an interdisciplinary conference I attended on “Rivers of the Anthropocene.” The conference left me with a lot to consider. There has been some informal discussion on Twitter about what an equivalent conference organized around coasts would look like. What is the anthropocene […]
Last week I attended a remarkable two-day conference in Indianapolis that brought together earth scientists, life scientists, social scientists, artists, historians, and theologians in a wide-ranging program about people and rivers in the anthropocene. The “anthropocene” is a new term expressing the idea that the human impact on the earth’s crust, the atmosphere, and the […]
In his TV series The Shock of the New, the art historian Robert Hughes remarked that politicians don’t like port towns. They are too colorful and ungovernable. He made this statement while discussing Brazil’s decision to build a futuristic capital city from scratch. Brasilia, by implication, was a rejection of Rio de Janeiro. Next, Hughes […]
I just finished Lena Lenček and Gideon Bosker’s The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth. [1] There’s a lot to think about here, but the most intriguing part of the book for me was the discussion of how many well-known modern beach resorts were—in various senses—built on reclaimed land, and cannot survive in their […]
