The first time I considered sailors in port as an academic subject was back in 1993, when—as a graduate student in search of a dissertation topic—I read the first chapter of Marcus Rediker’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Reactions to Devil varied, to be sure, but few have offered a coherent alternative […]
Many historians, young and old, nurse the lingering hope that their next round of research will uncover that career-making revelation, their personal equivalent of Carlo Ginzburg’s benandanti or Robert Darnton’s Great Cat Massacre. But if it turned up right in front of you, would you notice it? Don’t be so sure. Consider the sad case […]
When nineteenth-century Britons stood facing the ocean, what did they think about? Did they rejoice in the healthy sea breezes? Fret about a French invasion? Did they daydream about travel, worry about stock market crashes, plot the conversion of unbelievers in far-flung colonies? Or, watching the waves themselves, did they marvel at the scientific achievement […]
After my blog post on “Gérard Le Bouëdec’s sociétés littorales” appeared in April, Olivier Le Gouic wrote me to point out that much more had been published in this area. An entire edited volume, Entre terre et mer, appeared in 2004. [1] I will continue, albeit gradually, to explore and review the French scholarship in […]
I’m writing today in response to Glen O’Hara’s recent blog post, “What about the Silence in the Archive?” Glen visited the National Archives of the United States in search of American commentary on British water policy. The short version is that he discovered U.S. bureaucrats had a lot to say on everyone’s water policy (the […]
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 […]
