The Blue History Network
Our mission is to advance the understanding of the pivotal role of water in shaping historical events, cultures, economies, and societies. This website serves as a resource hub allowing you to discover valuable documents, literature and other materials to explore the historical significance of water.
Facilitating research
We offer a collection of resources, including academic journals and articles, reviews and podcasts tailored to enhance your research on blue history. Our goal is to simplify the research and access processes, enabling you to conduct in-depth studies with ease.
Promoting scholarly collaboration and outreach
We aim to foster a dynamic network of historians, other scholars and students to explore the intersection of water and history. By creating opportunities for collaboration, discussion, and the sharing of ideas, we hope to inspire innovative research and raise interest in the topic of the broader public.
Expanding historical perspectives
We invite scholars to critically think about historical narratives and findings by including water as a central perspective, as well as review on their articles by asking them: What if you’d bring water to the center of your analysis? How would your work change?
About the website
The recent “blue” turn in the humanities, as an effort to think critically about the role of water in literary, cultural, and historical studies, has created a rich and multidisciplinary conversation on the fluidity of human identities. Such a new “hydro-humanism” brings water at the center of people’s actions and relations, questioning the temporality, materiality, and spatiality of land-based analyses.
This website is meant to promote a blue approach to history. Blue history proposes a paradigmatic shift that asks historians to value water, in all its forms and shapes, as a point of reference and observation. It is an invitation to use water as a prism through which to look at how humans have shaped their own and indeed the planet’s past. This collective is open to historians coming from any subfield of the discipline.
Immerse yourself in the blue history perspective by exploring the following sections of our website:
Listen to academic podcasts conducted with specialists in the field of Blue History and the Blue Humanities.
Read about the reflections of authors and scholars on their own work by placing water at the centre of their narratives.
Take a look at newest events, publications and vacancies at the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies and partner institutes.
