Imagine surfing a perfect blue wave off a deserted beach of sparkling white sand. This book takes us back to a time when the earliest surfers were busy inventing the first American beach culture. The beautiful and nostalgic photographs that surfer Don James took of himself and his friends from 1936-46 capture the lost Eden of the California surf dream in all its glory and innocence. Over 100 sepia photos.
Despite a genuine admiration for Native Hawaiian culture, white Californians of the 1930s ignored authentic relationships with Native Hawaiians. Surfing became a central part of what emerged instead: a beach culture of dressing, dancing, and acting like an Indigenous people whites idealized. Patrick Moser uses surfing to open a door on the cultural appropriation practiced by Depression-era Californians against a backdrop of settler colonialism and white nationalism. Recreating the imagined leisure and romance of life in Waikīkī attracted people buffeted by economic crisis and dislocation. California-manufactured objects like surfboards became a physical manifestation of a dream that, for all its charms, emerged from a white impulse to both remove and replace Indigenous peoples. Moser traces the rise of beach culture through the lives of trendsetters Tom Blake, John “Doc” Ball, Preston “Pete” Peterson, Mary Ann Hawkins, and Lorrin “Whitey” Harrison while also delving into California’s control over images of Native Hawaiians via movies, tourism, and the surfboard industry. Compelling and innovative, Waikīkī Dreams opens up the origins of a defining California subculture.
"LEGENDARY SURFERS Volume 3: 1930s" details the surf world of the 1930s, including California, Florida, Hawaii, Australia and Britain. This is not a coffee table book. It is specifically written for surfers who want to know the details of the heritage we are blessed to share, as told by those who lived it.
Better than dry matches on a rainy night, this new edition locates and describes hundreds of marvelous camping opportunities and recreational activities. Featuring key campground eatures, facilities, and activities, this guide's 160 + maps take you right where you want to go. This edition is packed with maps and information on 87 state and national parks, lakes, beaches, forests, and recreation areas.
The image of surfing is everywhere in American popular culture – films, novels, television shows, magazines, newspaper articles, music, and especially advertisements. In this book, Kristin Lawler examines the surfer, one of the most significant and enduring archetypes in American popular culture, from its roots in ancient Hawaii, to Waikiki beach at the dawn of the twentieth century, continuing through Depression-era California, cresting during the early sixties, persistently present over the next three decades, and now, more globally popular than ever. Throughout, Lawler sets the image of the surfer against the backdrop of the negative reactions to it by those groups responsible for enforcing the Puritan discipline – pro-work, anti-spontaneity – on which capital depends and thereby offers a fresh take on contemporary discussions of the relationship between commercial culture and counterculture, and between counterculture and capitalism.
Thailand’s capital, Krungtep, known as Bangkok to Westerners and “the City of Angels” to Thais, has been home to smugglers and adventurers since the late eighteenth century. During the 1970s, it became a modern Casablanca to a new generation of treasure seekers: from surfers looking to finance their endless summers to wide-eyed hippie true believers and lethal marauders leftover from the Vietnam War. Moving a shipment of Thai sticks from northeast Thailand farms to American consumers meant navigating one of the most complex smuggling channels in the history of the drug trade. Peter Maguire and Mike Ritter are the first historians to document this underground industry, the only record of its existence rooted in the fading memories of its elusive participants. Conducting hundreds of interviews with smugglers and law enforcement agents, the authors recount the buy, the delivery, the voyage home, and the product offload. They capture the eccentric personalities who transformed the Thai marijuana trade from a GI cottage industry into one of the world’s most lucrative commodities, unraveling a rare history from the smugglers’ perspective.
Surfing today evokes many things: thundering waves, warm beaches, bikinis and lifeguards, and carefree pleasure. But is the story of surfing really as simple as popular culture suggests? In this first international political history of the sport, Scott Laderman shows that while wave riding is indeed capable of stimulating tremendous pleasure, its globalization went hand in hand with the blood and repression of the long twentieth century. Emerging as an imperial instrument in post-annexation Hawaii, spawning a form of tourism that conquered the littoral Third World, tracing the struggle against South African apartheid, and employed as a diplomatic weapon in America's Cold War arsenal, the saga of modern surfing is only partially captured by Gidget, the Beach Boys, and the film Blue Crush. From nineteenth-century American empire-building in the Pacific to the low-wage labor of the surf industry today, Laderman argues that surfing in fact closely mirrored American foreign relations. Yet despite its less-than-golden past, the sport continues to captivate people worldwide. Whether in El Salvador or Indonesia or points between, the modern history of this cherished pastime is hardly an uncomplicated story of beachside bliss. Sometimes messy, occasionally contentious, but never dull, surfing offers us a whole new way of viewing our globalized world.
Recommended by the United States Surfing Federation as a book that every beginning surfer should read, this instructional guide details the basics of surfing gear, conditions, safety, etiquette, and history. Written by someone who went through the learning process, topics are covered with just enough detail to get the reader riding the waves qui...
Orwell was wrong. Sports are not "war without the shooting", nor are they "war by other means." To be sure sports have generated animosity throughout human history, but they also require rules to which the participants agree to abide before the contest. Among other things, those rules are supposed to limit violence, even death. More than anything else, sports have been a significant part of a historical "civilizing process." They are the opposite of war. As the historical profession has taken its cultural turn over the last few decades, scholars have turned their attention to subject once seen as marginal. As researchers have come to understand the centrality of the human body in human history, they have come to study this most corporeal of human activities. Taking early cues from physical educators and kinesiologists, historians have been exploring sports in all their forms in order to help us answer the most fundamental questions to which scholars have devoted their lives. We have now seen a veritable explosion excellent work on this subject, just as sports have assumed an even greater share of a globalizing world's cultural, political and economic space. Practiced by millions and watched by billions, sports provide an enormous share of content on the Internet. This volume combines the efforts of sports historians with essays by historians whose careers have been devoted to more traditional topics. We want to show how sports have evolved from ancient societies to the world we inhabit today. Our goal is to introduce those from outside this sub-field to this burgeoning body of scholarship. At the same time, we hope here to show those who may want to study sport with rigor and nuance how to embark on a rewarding journey and tackle profound matters that have affected and will affect all of humankind.
