Tag Archives | 19th Century

Drawing of steam paddle boat

The Coastal History Blog 47: Elevated Waterfronts: Bird’s-Eye View Maps and Urban Coastal History

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 […]

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Cession of Kowloon

Corsairs and Collaborators: The Tankas and Early Colonial Hong Kong

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 […]

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Gibbet2

Dead Men Telling Tales: Maritime Gibbet Lore in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture

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 […]

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