The Lure of the Beach

With insight and wit, Ritchie traces the long and shifting human fascination with beaches, the alluring frontier of land and sea. From Baiae to Brighton and the Riviera to Waikiki, Ritchie illuminates the fancies and fashions of humanity over two thousand years to the current peril of rising ocean levels. Timely and lively, The Lure of the Beach can be read in the den or, better still, at the shore.––Alan Taylor, author of Thomas Jefferson's Education Drawing on extensive research, this engaging and informative new history of the therapeutic and recreational beach, from Roman times to the present, offers rich insights into how technology, economics, and class conspired with mores, manners, and medical science to produce the myth and reality of the beach as the premier site of our leisure escapes.––Lena Lencek, coauthor of The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth Robert C. Ritchie presents a fascinating global history of how we played at the beach from the eighteenth-century days of horse-drawn bathing machines for women in long gowns to the rise of beach resorts and the evolution of increasing skin exposure in female swimming garb.––Orrin Pilkey, Emeritus Coastal Geologist, Duke University Humans have bared far more than their bodies in going to the beach. Class and racial tensions, national differences, preoccupations with health, changing sexual mores and gender roles, the evolution of popular culture, national differences, and environmental change are all on full display. Beaches are where leisure has become a business. Ritchie conducts a 2,000-year tour of the world’s beaches. Rarely will readers learn so much so painlessly.––Richard White, author of The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896