Today’s guest post is from Sean Fraga, who recently received his Ph.D. in History from Princeton University, where he is currently a postgraduate research associate with the Center for Digital Humanities and the Department of History. Here, he discusses the genre (and rhetoric) of bird’s-eye view maps. Reconstructing how the different pieces of an urban […]
By now – after many years of work in the ‘Port Towns & Urban Cultures’ project – it’s probably old hat to say that port towns are important intersections between land and water, liminal zones and crossing points for people, goods and ideas. These transient places are of great interest to a range of historians, […]
By the Qing (1644-1912 CE) dynasty, the term ‘Tanka’ (pinyin: Danjia) became a common designation for people who lived on boats in the provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi, and Fujian. Throughout the development of the term ‘Tanka’, its various usages and iterations were always denigrating and alienating. Considered a base people, the Tanka were largely excluded […]
The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 meant that more and more paupers were forced to enter workhouses, since outdoor relief was essentially eliminated. This increase in admissions meant that workhouses were overflowing, and the Poor Law Board needed to find places to house all of the new admissions. One way that they accomplished this […]
The practice of gibbeting, also known more specifically as hanging in irons, or hanging in chains, was a particularly macabre punishment for a variety of convicted felons, and yet it is the image of the pirate cadaver swinging eerily in the breeze, which appears to have become most engrained in popular culture since the eighteenth […]
