Robert C. Ritchie

I am an historian who started my professional life at the University of California, San Diego. I left UCSD to become the Director of Research at the Huntington Library in San Marino California. My focus has always been on Early American History, first by writing about 17th century New York, but my more recent work has related to the sea. First with the publication of "Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates," and now with "The Lure of the Beach: A Global History," The latter is a book about the rise of Beach Resorts and wanders from ancient Rome to the present day and so takes me far from my roots in Early America. Since as a teenager I was raised in Southern California at a time when the beach was a nearly mandatory part of your life as it was the era of the Beach Boys, "Endless Summer" and Gidget. Between movies and music, Popular Culture was full of the world of California beaches. Like my peers summer was spent at the beach in search of sun, surf and girls. Little did I know that many years later I would turn to study the way people were attracted to the beach and what they did once they got there. As I would discover they did not always go for the same reasons I did. "Lure of the Beach" is the result.