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 […]
Urban football as a nineteenth-century blood sport
Second-year UoP student Mandy Wrenn discusses a 1846 engraving showing a large group of men playing football in the centre of the town of Kingston in Surrey, and the contemporary concerns over the control of urban spaces and popular leisure activities it reflects. This piece was originally written for the Fear and Fun module, taught […]
The ‘Whitechapel Horrors’ – Victorian newspapers report Jack the Ripper as gothic fiction
The ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders in East London in the late Victorian period have become infamous. In this piece, first year UoP history student Seamus McLoughlin looks at how an article in a Victorian newspaper was of its time in choosing to ignore known facts about the case, or any compassion towards the victims, in […]