I’ve observed before in this blog that some of the best scholarship on port towns and urban cultures is written by people who arrive at this subject matter by a circuitous route, almost in spite of themselves. Maud Mandel’s recent book, Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict, does not present itself as […]
Tag Archives | coastal history
The Coastal History Blog 27: “The Sailor’s Yarn”
Visitors to Salem, Massachusetts are likely to make a beeline for anything related to the celebrated witch trials. A few older tourists will notice the sites connected to Nathaniel Hawthorne (my generation was probably the last to read The Scarlet Letter in school as an obligatory part of the American canon). Both the witch trials […]
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 […]
The Coastal History Blog 25: “The Encroaching Coast”
Most people wouldn’t associate northern Indiana with shipwrecks, but Lake Michigan has its share of them. The J.D. Marshall sank in 1911, where it remains, just a stone’s throw offshore from the Indiana Dunes State Park. It was a “sand sucker,” employed in pulling up sand from the lake bed for industrial use. The J.D. […]
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 […]
Mapping the Waterfront: Life, Heritage and Visualization of the Port City
Department of Historical Studies, Gothenburg University, Sweden, 9th September 2014 A recent workshop by the Universities of Gothenburg and Portsmouth brought together academics, archivists and heritage professionals to discuss the methodologies, data and potential beneficiaries of mapping port towns. Dr Tomas Nilson and Dr Brad Beaven opened proceedings and explained that the history of port […]
