Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach

Reframing the American story from the vantage point of the nation’s watery edges, Jamin Wells shows that disasters have not only bedeviled the American beach — they created it. Though the American beach is now one of the most commercialized, contested, and engineered places on the planet, few people visited it or called it home at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By the twentieth century, the American beach had become the summer encampment of presidents, a common destination for mil...