Shifting Currents

Rezensionen / Stimmen

2023 Outstanding Academic Title * Choice * The standout title in a strong field, making a rich contribution not only to sport history but to wider aspects of sport scholarship and practice, and to fields beyond sport studies . . . the work [has] revealed so much new information on a sport that has attracted relatively little attention among sport historians and scholars . . . a major text in the field. * Winner: North American Society Sport History (NASSH) Monograph Book Award 2023 * Readers coming to this social history of swimming expecting light-weight beach fare might be surprised by both its scope and the depth of its analysis. Drawing on archaeological, documentary and visual sources from ancient cultures to the 20th century, it sketches the ways in which the ability to swim - or, conversely, a suspicious inability to do so - became markers of class, status and moral virtue. * BBC History magazine * This ambitious work achieves its aims of being a fascinating and highly informative world history, written for the lay reader with an interest in this rich topic, and beautifully illustrated. * The Conversation * Karen Eva Carr gives a comprehensive history of swimming and examines the tension that arose when non-swimming northerners met African and Southeast Asian swimmers. When looking at trends in swimming, it is fascinating to learn about the global enthusiasm for the water. * Outdoor Swimmer * Using an innovative analysis of archaeological, textual, and art-historical sources, historian Carr traces the shifting nature of the human love and fear of swimming . . . This meticulously researched, carefully constructed work is dense but fascinating nevertheless and easy to read. Highly recommended. * Choice * In Shifting Currents, Carr offers a comprehensive history of swimming from the paleolithic to the present . . . that not only charts its development around the world but does so in a way that ties together its history with larger trends in global history. Written in a very readable style, full of handsome images, Shifting Currents should be read by scholars and non-scholars alike interested in swimming, sport more generally, and global histories. -- Keith Rathbone * New Books Network: New Books in Sport * The scholarly Shifting Currents examines how cultural markers and power dynamics have been linked to people's ease in the water. Whether examining sea-battle drownings, trial by water for witchcraft or racial segregation in pools, Carr rarely appears out of her depth. It's a plunge worth taking too, with an 800BC Assyrian relief showing enemies doggy-paddling in flight across a river; an AD1000 Tibetan temple mural depicting Buddha rescuing a fisherman in distress; and a Breugel boy using an inflated bladder to keep afloat. * World of Interiors * What a reader can take away from this history are the many ways that societies have constructed narratives out of the human relationships with bodies of water and how those narratives work to construct hierarchies based on race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and gender. Carr's commentary is both interesting and helpful. * Aethlon: Journal of the Sport Literature Association * The latest book to dive into the subject of swimming history, as interpreted by historians and journalists, is Shifting Currents: A World History of Swimming, an incredibly well-researched and richly illustrated book. The things that separate Carr's book from the rest are her background as an expert in classical art and ancient archaeology and her use of art through the ages - from all inhabited continents - to help tell her story. And what a story! * Swimming World * Karen Eva Carr's ambitious history of swimming seeks to challenge Renaissance ideas about the origins of swimming and move the focus beyond Europe . . . Her light touch, fast pace and short chapters help ensure we glide across the surface and don't get stuck in the murky weeds of academic debate. Shifting Currents will surprise and shock you as Carr explores how racism, enslavement, misogyny and class have shaped the history of swimming. There is an extraordinary amount of love and research here, along with an excellent reading list so you can continue to explore the themes and periods which speak to you most. * The Outdoor Swimming Society * Karen Eva Carr's Shifting Currents examines the history of swimming from ancient times to our modern day from a world-historical lens. Carr weaves together archeological, textual, and art-historical sources, as she examines the on-going tension between swimmers and non-swimmers over the course of time . . . Shifting Currents is an important and welcome addition to the historiography of swimming. Carr critically assesses the complexities of swimmers and non-swimmers since ancient times . . . Students and scholars interested in the history of sports, swimming, social history, class, race, public health, and world history will all find something interesting in this insightful monograph. -- Maria Carreras * History Journal * Shifting Currents is a valuable contribution to the historiography of swimming not only because of the global scope of the work but also because it goes beyond the chronological, descriptive approach adopted by the majority of texts on the subject. Carr challenges the reader to think more deeply about how modern sports and leisure activities like swimming have evolved in the way that they have and the influence of power and social elites on their development . . . Shifting Currents tells an engaging story, illustrated extensively throughout, and it presents the author's arguments in an accessible and readable fashion. * Idrottsforum.org * Shifting Currents is a must-have for anyone interested in human beings' long history of swimming. Guiding readers across human experience from the earliest times to the present, from Africa to Europe, Asia, the Americas, Australia and Oceania (Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia), Karen Eva Carr provides swimming enthusiasts and scholars with a unique, rich and engaging examination of swimming. * Kevin Dawson, Associate Professor of History, University of California, Merced, and author of 'Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora' * All humans can swim, but not everyone makes the effort to learn. Karen Eva Carr's expansive and engaging volume traces a complex narrative about the "art" of swimming in world history since the last Ice Age. Carr shows how different cultures organized themselves against each other in relation to swimming practices, from the skilled exploits of Indigenous and African swimmers to the radical immersions of avant-garde Europeans like Byron and Shelley to modern cultural battles over access to watery spaces from California to Australia to Japan. She demonstrates the recurrence of fundamental cultural anxieties about the water - that it's too sacred to be polluted by humans, it encourages sexual licentiousness, it's dangerous, and it promotes racial and class mixing - and shows how these ancient patterns continue in our ambivalently water-focused present. As seas rise in the twenty-first century, we should heed the lessons of this rich history. * Steve Mentz, St. John's University, author of 'Ocean' (2020) and 'Shipwreck Modernity' (2015) * A fascinating story about swimmers and swimming across the world from antiquity to the present. In exploring the many ways that swimming has served as a marker of cultural and social difference, archaeologist and historian Karen Carr has, in effect, produced a sweeping history of world civilizations from a new vantage point. Swimmers and non-swimmers alike will find much to enjoy in this learned, ambitious and lively book. * Nigel Nicholson, Walter Mintz Professor of Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and Humanities, Reed College *