Empire and its afterlives 2: How do you teach history with primary sources?
This is the second post in the Empire and its afterlives series. The introduction can be found here. Primary sources represent a wide range of materials which historians can draw on, and students made the most of this diversity. The podcast episodes included discussions of armed forces recruitment posters, political speeches and pamphlets, as well […]
Empire and its Afterlives 1: Applying the skills of the historian to the present
This is the first post in a series of four showcasing the work of second year students from across the University of Portsmouth Faculty of Social Sciences Click this link to see a video of George the Poet on the Benin Bronzes Empire and its Afterlives is a module available for second year students across […]
Zooming in on seventeenth-century elite food culture
Third-year student Ashleigh Hufton writes about the experience of presenting her undergraduate research at the British Conference of Undergraduate Research. Because of the pandemic, Ashleigh had to get to grips with presenting on Zoom a process she found nerve-racking but a very worthwhile learning experience. Ashleigh’s dissertation research, ‘Social Differentiation and the Polite Society: Food […]
“Let’s start at the very beginning”: an attempt to explain the dissertation and provide reassurance
By James Farrar, final-year history student at the University of Portsmouth. James’s supervisor Dr Fiona McCall writes: James was an exemplary dissertation student, always ahead of schedule in planning and carrying out his dissertation work, making him ideally placed to advise others on how to go about it. James’s dissertation, ‘“This creature not deserving […]
Could Churchill have done more to prevent the holocaust? The evidence of a personal letter
Callum Chinn, now in his final year studying history at Portsmouth, wrote this blog piece for the second-year Introduction to Historical Research module last year. In it, he examines a letter written by Winston Churchill in July 1944, and what it reveals about the allies’ knowledge of and response to the holocaust. The twentieth century […]
Poisonous Reading – James Greenwood attacks the Victorian ‘penny dreadful’
In this piece, written for the Fear and Fun module, taught by Dr Rob James and Dr Karl Bell, second year UoP student Amber Braddick discusses journalist James Greenwood’s exaggerated denouncement of the Victorian ‘penny dreadful’. Despite such middle-class anxietes over the corrupting influence of cheap print on working class youth, many of their stories […]