Between Land and Sea: The Atlantic Coast and the Transformation of New England

A virtual illustrated talk by Christopher L. Pastore, author and Assistant Professor of History at the University at Albany, State University of New York based on his book “Between Land and Sea: The Atlantic Coast and the Transformation of New England”

One of the largest estuaries on the North Atlantic coast, Narragansett Bay served as a gateway for colonial expansion in the seventeenth century and the birthplace of American industrialization in the late eighteenth. Christopher Pastore presents an environmental history of this watery corner of the Atlantic world, beginning with the first European settlement in 1636 and ending with the dissolution of the Blackstone Canal Company in 1849. Between Land and Sea traces how the Bay’s complex ecology shaped the contours of European habitation, trade, and resource use, and how littoral settlers in turn reconfigured the physical and cultural boundaries between humans and nature.

Narragansett Bay emerges in Pastore’s account as much more than a geological formation. Rather, he reimagines the nexus of land and sea as a brackish borderland shaped by the tension between what English settlers saw as improvable land and the perpetual forces of the North Atlantic Ocean. By draining swamps, damming rivers, and digging canals, settlers transformed a marshy coastal margin into a clearly defined edge. The resultant “coastline” proved less resilient, less able to absorb the blows of human initiative and natural variation than the soggy fractal of water and earth it replaced.

Today, as sea levels rise and superstorms batter coasts with increasing ferocity, Between Land and Sea calls on the environmentally-minded to make a space in their notions of progress for impermanence and uncertainty in the natural world.

WHEN: Sunday, March 9, 2025
TIME: 4 p.m.
PLACE: Virtual via zoom

About the Author

Christopher L. Pastore is Associate Professor of History at the University at Albany, State University of New York, where he teaches courses in environmental history, early America, and the Atlantic world. He holds a Ph.D. in American History and M.S. in college teaching from the University of New Hampshire, an M.F.A. in nonfiction Creative Writing from New School University, and a B.A. in Biology from Bowdoin College. He has held research fellowships at the University of Munich, Trinity College Dublin, and most recently at the Yale Center for British Art and as a Fulbright scholar at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia.

A Rhode Island native, Pastore grew up sailing, fishing and exploring Narragansett Bay. His journalistic work has appeared in the New York Times, Boat International, Cruising World, Newport Life, Offshore, Restoration Quarterly, Real Simple, and Sailing World, where he worked as Associate Editor. He also served as Editor of American Sailor and Junior Sailor, the official publications of U.S. Sailing, the sport’s national governing body. In 2005, he published a biography of Rhode Island yacht designer Nathanael G. Herreshoff (1848-1938) titled Temple to the Wind: The Story of America’s Greatest Naval Architect and His Masterpiece, Reliance (Lyons Press, 2005), early selections from which earned him the 2003 National Arts Club Annual Award for Nonfiction. He is currently writing an environmental history of the early modern Atlantic world with a special focus on slimy things in the sea.

PHOTO CREDIT: Martin Johnson Heade, Rhode Island Shore, 1858, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of Charles C. and Elma Ralphs Shoemaker.