Against Sand and Sea: Strategies on Coastal Defense
** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall ** November 5, 2014, in the Linda Hall Library Auditorium. Dr. Joana Gaspar de Freitas is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the New University of Lisbon and a 2014 Research Fellow at the Linda Hall Library. Every year the media brings us news about coastal storms and damaging flooding somewhere in the world and these catastrophic events seem to be increasing. This type of natural disaster is not new. They have happened repeatedly in history, but historians normally are not interested in these subjects and scholars from natural sciences rarely deal with events that lie more than a few decades in the past. In this lecture. Dr. Gaspar will discuss the long-term perspective of humanity’s relationship with the sea and strategies to protect from its dangers. Using as examples case studies from Europe and the U.S., she will demonstrate how human choices over the last centuries have contributed to the enhancement of the natural hazards that we face today. Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
