'Swimming with Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale' challenges the popular image of Samuel Johnson as a man who favoured energetic discussion over physical exercise, enthroned in an armchair peering short-sightedly at a book. Thanks to the diarist and author Hester Thrale we have many anecdotes that connect Dr Johnson to a variety of sports, and Julia Allen, following Lytton Strachey's advice to attack her subject in unexpected places, uses entries from Dr Johnson's dictionary and anecdotes about the great man as her window into the world of eighteenth-century sport and exercise. Revealing a world both foreign and familiar, Allen takes the reader through a range of sports and activities, from boxing and cricket to dancing and coach travel to swimming, riding and skating. She reasserts women's place in eighteenth century sport, especially the luckier ones such as Mrs Thrale, and draws on medical treatises and reports to show how dangerous these sports could be, and to explore the theories upon which contemporary notions about health and exercise were based. Combined with fascinating biographies not only of Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale, but also of a host of eighteenth-century sporting celebrities, Swimming with Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale gives a fascinating insight into a century where things were done very differently, often with dangerous consequences. This eccentric book brings together pieces of eighteenth-century life to create a vivid picture of the whole, making it essential reading for anybody interested in history or sport.

What could be better than diving into cool water on a hot day? In this enormously enjoyable and informative history of swimming, Eric Chaline sums up this most summery of moments with one phrase: pleasure beckons at the water’s edge. Strokes of Genius traces the history of swimming from the first civilizations to its current worldwide popularity as a sport, fitness pastime, and leisure activity. Chaline explores swimming’s role in ritual, early trade and manufacturing, warfare, and medicine, before describing its transformation in the early modern period into a leisure activity and a competitive sport—the necessary precursors that have made it the most common physical pastime in the developed world. The book celebrates the physicality and sensuality of swimming—attributes that Chaline argues could have contributed to the evolution of the human species. Swimming, like other disciplines that use repetitive movements to train the body and quiet the mind, is also a means of spiritual awakening—a personal journey of discovery. Swimming has attained the status of a cultural marker, denoting eroticism, leisure, endurance, adventure, exploration, and excellence. Strokes of Genius shows that there is not a single story of human swimming, but many currents that merge, diverge, and remerge. Chaline argues that swimming will become particularly important as we look toward a warmer future in which our survival may depend on our ability to adapt to life in an aquatic world.

This book explores how different constituencies influenced the development of nineteenth-century swimming in England, and highlights the central role played by swimming professors. These professionals were influential in inspiring participation in swimming, particularly among women, well before the amateur community created the Amateur Swimming Association, and this volume outlines some key life-courses to illustrate their working practices. Female exhibitors were important to professors and chapter three discusses these natationists and their impact on women’s swimming. Subsequent chapters address the employment opportunities afforded by new swimming baths and the amateur community that formed clubs and a national organization, which excluded swimming professors, many of whom subsequently worked successfully abroad. Dave Day and Margaret Roberts argue that the critical role played by professors in developing swimming has been forgotten, and suggest that their story is a reminder that individuals were just as important to the foundation of modern sport as the formation of amateur organizations.

In this biography, Lee Morgan tells the story of Henry Thrale, a successful but flawed and troubled businessman and Member of Parliament who was at the center of the life of the most famous man of letters of the eighteenth century, Dr. Samuel Johnson. Thrale was also married to an exceptionally talented diarist and, perhaps, the most brilliant society leader of the period, Hester Salusbury Thrale, later Mrs. Gabriel Piozzi. In chronicling both the domestic life and the career of Thrale, Dr. Johnson's "Own Dear Master" also affords an interesting glimpse of eighteenth-century business, political, and social life of the age of Johnson as it was played out by some of the principal figures of the day.

Gordon Sumner was born in a mainly working-class area of North Tyneside, England, in 1951. Decades later, we would come to know him as Sting, one of the world’s best-selling music artists. Sting was the lead singer of the Police from 1977 to 1984 before launching a hugely successful solo career. In Sting:From Northern Skies to Fields of Gold, popular music scholar Paul Carr argues that the foundations of Sting’s creativity and drive for success were established by his birthplace, with vestiges of his “Northern Englishness” continuing to emerge in his music long after he left his hometown. Carr frames Sting’s creative impetus and output against the real, imagined, and idealized places he has occupied. Focusing on the sometimes-blurry borderlines between nostalgia, facts, imagination, and memories—as told by Sting, the people who knew (and know) him, and those who have written about him—Carr investigates the often complex resonance between local boy Gordon Sumner and the star the world knows as Sting. Published to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the formation of the definitive line-up of the Police, this is the first book to examine the relationship between Sting’s working class background in Newcastle, the life he has consequently lived, and the creativity and inspiration behind his music.

A human and global take on a beloved vacation spot. The crash of surf, smell of salted air, wet whorls of sand underfoot. These are the sensations of the beach, that environment that has drawn humans to its life-sustaining shores for millennia. And while the gull’s cry and the cove’s splendor have remained constant throughout time, our relationship with the beach has been as fluid as the runnels left behind by the tide’s turning. The Lure of the Beach is a chronicle of humanity's history with the coast, taking us from the seaside pleasure palaces of Roman elites and the aquatic rituals of medieval pilgrims, to the venues of modern resort towns and beyond. Robert C. Ritchie traces the contours of the material and social economies of the beach throughout time, covering changes in the social status of beach goers, the technology of transport, and the development of fashion (from nudity to Victorianism and back again), as well as the geographic spread of modern beach-going from England to France, across the Mediterranean, and from nineteenth-century America to the world. And as climate change and rising sea levels erode the familiar faces of our coasts, we are poised for a contemporary reckoning with our relationship—and responsibilities—to our beaches and their ecosystems. The Lure of the Beach demonstrates that whether as a commodified pastoral destination, a site of ecological resplendency, or a flashpoint between private ownership and public access, the history of the beach is a human one that deserves to be told now more than ever before.

The biggest challenges in public health today are often related to attitudes, diet and exercise. In many ways, this marks a return to the state of medicine in the eighteenth century, when ideals of healthy living were a much more central part of the European consciousness than they have become since the advent of modern clinical medicine. Enlightenment advice on healthy lifestyle was often still discussed in terms of the six non-naturals – airs and places, food and drink, exercise, excretion and retention, and sleep and emotions. This volume examines what it meant to live healthily in the Enlightenment in the context of those non-naturals, showing both the profound continuities from Antiquity and the impact of newer conceptions of the body. Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429465642

"Youth culture is not an invention of 20th-century movies and television; youth have been forming their own cultures from the moment they were given space to invent their own ways of relating to one another and to their parents and communities. Taking a global approach and beginning in early modern Europe, the essays in the Oxford Handbook of the History of Youth Culture provide broadly contextualized case studies of the ways in which the meanings and expressions of both "youth" and "culture" have evolved through time and space. The authors show that youth culture has been shaped by geography, ethnicity, class, gender, faith, technology, and myriad other factors. Examining subjects ranging from monastic schools to online communities, from enslaved youth in the Caribbean to Indigenous students at government sanctioned boarding schools, from youthful entrepreneurs to youthful activists, from war to sexuality, and from art to literature, the essays show that there have been many youth cultures. Throughout, authors emphasize the ways in which the idea of youth culture could become contested terrain-between youth and their families, their communities, and the culture at large-as well as the importance of youth agency in carving out separate lives. Among the tensions explored are the struggle between control and independence, as well as the explicit and implicit differences between male and female constructions of youth culture"--

A collection of major articles representing some of the best historical research by some of the world's most distinguished historians.