Shipwrecks and the Making of the American Beach

Giovanni Da Verranzano’s morose first impression of the North American coast in 1524 – “It appeared to be rather low-lying” – stands in sharp contrast to modern paeans for sun, surf, and sand. Like later explorers, Verranzano largely overlooked the sandy beaches and barrier islands that one in four Americans now visit every year, favoring instead the “many beautiful fields and plains full of great forests … promontories” and “aggregable” natural harbors. For the next 250 years, English, French, Spanish, and Dutch settlers agreed with the Italian explorer and sited their farms and settlements by protected bays, natural harbors, navigable rivers, and fertile lands that were safely removed from the physically dynamic, culturally reviled oceanfront. Remarkably few people lived, worked, visited or valued this landscape when the colonial beach became an American frontier. Yet by the final decades of the century, the coast had become the summer encampment of American presidents, a common destination for millions of citizens, and home to rapidly suburbanizing beachfront communities.

This poster presentation explores the radical transformation of the American coast’s physical, social, and cultural landscapes during the nineteenth century. It argues that the ubiquitous coastal shipwreck unleashed a torrent of public and private energies that turned the coastal frontier into the modern beach, a thoroughly integrated, heterogeneous, commercialized space. While coastal disasters associated with climate change make headlines today, shipwrecks were the disasters that shaped the shore during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whether they cost lives, made heroes, imperiled profits, or provided opportunities, coastal shipwrecks disrupted the worlds of the shipwrecked and the communities upon which they landed, luring an array of state and non-state actors into the littoral and spurring the development of organizations and institutions that turned an isolated frontier into a constituent part of modern America. Disaster, simply stated, made the beach.

The poster will outline the broad argument of my book-in-progress, demonstrating the formative role played by the American oceanfront in the development of the state and American identity, and challenging the traditional scholarly focus on cities and “the west” as the loci of American modernity. By complicating existing historiographies on the frontier and disaster, it argues the early nineteenth-century coast was a frontier as formative to the American experience as the western frontier. It also expands the evolving historical scholarship on disaster by looking beyond singular disasters to an analysis of large-scale patterns of “everyday” disasters. Finally, it offers a broader conceptualization of coastal development and change, a much-needed scholarly perspective for our age of rapid change along our coastlines.