The Firths and Fjords: A Coastal History Conference will be held from Thursday 31 March to Saturday 2 April 2016 at The Centre for History, University of the Highlands and Islands, Dornoch. This conference will explore the pasts of communities living near or along adjacent coastlines: firths, sea lochs, fjords, estuaries, inlets, sounds, narrow gulfs and […]
Port Towns and Urban Culture’s Dr Karl Bell has launched a new project based at the University of Portsmouth entitled Supernatural Cities: Narrated Geographies and Spectral Histories. The project seeks to encourage the formation of a multi- and interdisciplinary network of researchers who will explore the relationships between urban environments, the supernatural, and the cultural […]
The Sailor’s Hornpipe, also known as “The Jig of the Ship,” “Jack the Lad,” or “Deck Dancing,”[1] was a common sight in ports, danced and performed in sailortown areas across the globe. The Sailor’s Hornpipe became a staple dance of the Royal Navy, so much so “the sailor’s hornpipe was one of the glories of […]
Review: Daniel Owen Spence, Colonial Naval Culture and British Imperialism, 1922-67. Manchester University Press, Studies in Imperialism, 2015 – full details here. This is not your traditional naval history. Aligning himself with those whom he describes as ‘cultural-naval historians’ (2), Spence aims – as he puts it in the book’s final sentence – to understand […]
Today, I’m happy to introduce the Coastal History Blog’s second guest post, by Katy Roscoe. (The first guest post was by Julia Leikin.) Island studies have featured before in this blog, in “Are Islands Insular?” but also in “Offshore and Offshoring”. In today’s post, Roscoe explains how her work as part of the Carceral Archipelago […]
Such was the infamy of the English prison hulks that Napoleon Bonaparte is reported to have shouted before the battle of Waterloo: “Soldiers, let those among you who have been prisoners of the English describe to you the hulks, and detail the most frightful miseries which they endured!”[1] It is interesting that Napoleon, the person […]
