Tag Archives | port history

CFP: Post/Colonial Ports : Place and Nonplace in the Ecotone

Post/Colonial Ports : Place and Nonplace in the Ecotone Concordia University, Montreal, Canada October 24-26, 2019 Conference #6 in the Ecotone series In partnership with EMMA (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3), MIGRINTER (CNRS-Université de Poitiers) and La Maison Française d’Oxford Deadline for submitting proposals: April 5, 2019 After conferences in Montpellier, Poitiers and La Réunion (France, 2015, 2016 […]

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Desire is projected across ‘empty’ space in Calvino’s Invisible Cities. 

Seascape with Distant Coast, by J. M. W. Turner, c. 1830-1845. © Tate. Image reproduced by permission of Tate and under CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported).

Port Cities and Desire in the Work of Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino’s (1923-1985) Invisible Cities is a work of fiction that continuously reimagines the city of Venice. It demonstrates that the same urban landscape may offer numerous different promises to its various spectators: of new lives and new possibilities, but also of new sensualities, transgressions, and experiments. This article will draw on a number of […]

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Boat Building at Bridport Harbour, c.19th Century.
By Permission of Bridport Town Council

The Naval History Blog: No. 8

Why maritime history matters: Maritime highways – A personal journey. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book aptly titled The Prize, Daniel Yergin quotes Admiral ‘Jacky’ Fisher as telling Winston Churchill, on the latter’s appointment to First Lord of the Admiralty in September 1911, ‘east of Suez oil is cheaper than coal.’[1] It later became clear […]

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Sailor with a lion cub (Courtesy of Brain Witts, Curator of the HMS Excellent collection)

The Sailor Zoo and Farm in Portsmouth: Re-enchantment and Necessity (Part 1 of 2)

In 1832 the Fourth Sea Lord of the Admiralty suggested there was a need for ‘theoretical instruction’ in gunnery. Thus what had been previously considered an art became a science.[1] Marine artillery embraced the science and technology of the age, and this modernisation of gunnery was aligned with a transition from sail to steam ships. […]

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BGEAH Conference 2017: Land and Water.

The British Group of Early American Historians conference 2017, is open for registration! The theme this year is ‘Land and Water: Port Towns, Maritime Connections, and Oceanic Spaces of the Early Modern Atlantic World’ and will take place at the University of Portsmouth between 31 August – 3 September 2017. Event co-organiser, Dr Tom Rodgers describes the […]

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