Port Towns & Urban Cultures: International Histories of the Waterfront, c.1700 – 2000, Eds. Brad Beaven, Karl Bell and Robert James, (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2016) Despite the port’s prominence in maritime history, its cultural significance has long been neglected in favour of its role within economic and imperial networks. Defined by their intersection of maritime […]
Maritime Masculinities, 1815-1940 19th- 20th December, 2016, Oxford, UK Keynote speakers include: Dr Mary Conley, College of the Holy Cross, USA Prof. Joanne Begiato, Oxford Brookes University Dr Isaac Land, Indiana State University, USA The Department of History, Philosophy & Religion, Oxford Brookes University, and the Port Towns and Urban Cultures group, University of Portsmouth, invite […]
The War at Sea is rarely considered when discussing the impact of the First World War but, although it involved far fewer men on the front line, keeping the seas safe and the vital supplies flowing to feed the Army and the people of Britain and Ireland cannot be overlooked. From across Ireland over 10,000 […]
Despite the cleansing of the sailor image during the late Victorian era, many contemporaries viewed sailors’ predilection for drink as a worrying problem.[1] In particular, Agnes Weston used the image of a drunken sailor riding a barrel to make her case for the temperance movement, although this portrayal was condemned by sailors.[2] Yet, the image […]
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 […]
In The Myth of the Press Gang, J. Ross Dancy offers a quantitative approach to the subject. He developed a sampling system and entered the details as recorded in individual ships’ muster books covering the period 1793-1801. Data entry took twenty two weeks. The end result was a database including 27,174 individuals, “roughly a 10 […]
