WHAT: Brown Bag Lecture Series
HOSTED BY: UNK Department of History
TITLE: “Danish and English Competition in the North Atlantic during the 16th and Early 17th Centuries”
TOPIC: Beginning in the 16th century, the English crown sponsored voyages of exploration in the North Atlantic. During these expeditions, English mariners claimed control over lands throughout the region. As English political and economic claims expanded, Danish rulers increasingly became worried as they believed they had sovereign rights over the entire region based on Scandinavian settlement of the North Atlantic during the Viking Age. To make real their claims in the North Atlantic, Danish monarchs engaged in diplomacy with the English and sent several voyages to assert control over Greenland. This talk explores diplomatic tensions between England and Denmark, and the Danish crown’s attempts to exert sovereignty over the North Atlantic.
PRESENTER: Mary Beth Ailes is a professor of early modern European history at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Her research specialties are Scandinavia, the British Isles, military history, diplomatic history and social history. She has published several articles and two monographs that investigate connections between warfare and societal developments during the early modern period. Her publications include “Military Migration and State Formation: The British Military Community in Seventeenth-Century Sweden” and “Courage and Grief: Women and Sweden’s Thirty Years’ War.”
TIME: Noon
DATE: Wednesday, April 12
PLACE: Kearney Public Library, 2020 First Ave.
CONTACT: Nathan Tye, assistant history professor, 308.865.8860, tyen@unk.edu
