History
There are still countless natural swimming places that meet this definition and many are still used. Efforts in recent years to clean up such bodies of water have actually resulted in cleaner water in many rivers and creeks and healthier natural places to swim.
In Europe, as the nineteenth century dawned, a new era of contemporary artists were rediscovering the appeal of the swimming hole. The waterfall, surrounded by trees and mountains, was now regarded as the quintessence of beauty. William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey spent much time bathing in the mountain pools of the Lake District. The study and search for the ‘picturesque’ and ‘sublime’ – an almost scientific measure of loveliness and proportion in the landscape – had reached epidemic proportions. The fashionable tours of Provence or Tuscany were replaced by trips to the valleys of Wales, and the dales of the UK's Cumbria and Yorkshire, as Turner and Constable painted a prodigious flow of falls, tarns and ponds.
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“A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)