Re/Views
We ask authors the same question: what if you’d bring water to the center of your analysis? How would your work change? We take it from there and discuss with colleagues and friends about the watery avenues of their research.
In each of these articles we take you through a book and subject that might initially appear not to be important to blue history, but is. After describing the subject and author’s unique and intriguing work, we discuss with them about their research, blue history, and ask each the same question: If you brought water relations more to the center of your work and its analysis, do you think that it would significantly change in its form, argument, subject, or conclusion? If so, how?
To read the whole Re/View, make sure to click on the corresponding image.
Access to water is not limited to hydration. It is additionally significant culturally, socially, and personally to individuals. Being denied access to it is then punitive. The Troubled-Teen Industry represents an often understudied case study for understanding the importance of considering people as fluid beings.
Maia Szalavitz, Help At Any Cost, 2006, Riverhead
To be lost at sea after a shipwreck is an experience of total separation from the comfortable stability of land to the unrelenting change and depth of the ocean. The story of the USS Pampanito brings forward key themes of the blue humanities and reminds us of the unique struggles of oceanic travel.
Aldona Sendzikas, Lucky 73, 2010, University Press of Florida, publisher page
Memory requires an aquatic way of thinking. The American Civil War seeps up from the past and ever-forming narratives shape its significance. What does studying the fluid legacy of Civil War general Nathan Bedford Forrest teach us about the creation and and continuity of a myth?
Court Carney, Reckoning With the Devil, 2024, Louisiana State University Press, publisher page
How did American cities in the 19th century solve their trash epidemics without the formal capacity to do so? And what can Patricia Strach and Kathleen Sullivan’s history of how governments utilize corruption and social hierarchy tell us about blue history?
Patricia Strach and Kathleen Sullivan, The Politics of Trash, 2023, Cornell University Press, publisher page
Disaster has been a part of blue history since its beginning. Foreign aid has been a part of American foreign policy for over a century. How did Americans justify foreign disaster aid, what conditions did they attach, and how did water structure both disaster and response?
Julia Irwin, Catastrophic Diplomacy, 2024, University of North Carolina Press, publisher page
The American Civil War released a torrent of movements that fought to make the United States a more equal place, drawing on popular dissatisfaction with economic and social precarity. How did Americans collectively respond to the (previous) Gilded Age, and how did water structure inequality and collective organizing?
Charles Postel, Equality: An American Dilemma, 2019, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, publisher page
The United States is more than a superpower, it is an ‘Empire of Ideas’ whose cultural influence, delivered through extensive state infrastructure, is globally pervasive. This position is no accident, but the product of decades of policy, much of it forged in the crucible of the Second World War. But how did this policy develop, and what challenges does the ‘Empire of Ideas’ face today?
Justin Hart, Empire of Ideas: the origins of public diplomacy and the transformation of U.S. foreign policy, 2013, Oxford University Press, publisher page
