This week our own Dr Matthew Heaslip was interviewed by multiple national and regional media outlets including ITV Meridian, BBC South Today and The Guardian to help contextualise Britain’s response via the Royal Navy to America’s war on Iran, specifically the practicalities of the deployment of the destroyer HMS Duncan. Along with being Senior Lecturer in Naval History teaching on Portsmouth’s MA in Naval, Maritime and Coastal History he is also a Visiting Fellow at the Royal Navy’s Strategic Studies Centre. Matt’s research centres on the 20th century Navy, the importance of naval power in Britain’s efforts to exert influence worldwide and its applicability to present-day global geopolitics. ‘When faced with […]
Author Archive | Fiona McCall
The conflicted loyalties of gunmakers during the English Civil Wars and after
English Civil War royalism has often been depicted as the preserve of the elite, but this was not necessarily the case, as MRes student Natalie Lejeune found in her research into the activities of gunmakers during and after the civil wars. Prior royal service often inclined these specialist craftsmen towards the Royalists initially. After the Royalist defeat, they transferred their work to a new Republican Government prepared to tolerate their dubious loyalties in exchange for their much-needed skills. Yet their loyalties remained conflicted, with some, including female-gunmakers as well as men, secretly supplying arms to Royalist conspiracists on the side, a pattern of mixed loyalties which mirrors those in France […]
Guiding the next generation of history students to become their best selves
James Farrar finished his history studies at Portsmouth in 2021. Although James had always been set on a career in teaching, he decided to gain some hands on experience before studying for his PGCert, which he is planning to gain next year, via the more practical School-Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT) route. Below he describes some of the highs and lows of his past four years gaining experience as a teaching assistant, student engagement worker, and cover supervisor, an honest and humorous appraisal (there seems to be a lavatorial theme!) which should be invaluable to current students aiming to follow a similar career trajectory. Time flies when you are having […]
Was mid-17th century Britain a dystopian society?
Dr Fiona Mccall was interviewed in December for the 1984 Today! podcast on all things dystopian, being intrigued by the concept of thinking about the 1640s and 1650s, in this way. How did the strictures of the real puritan regime of mid-17th century Britain compare with fictional dystopias like those of Orwell, Huxley, John Wyndham, Margaret Atwood and John Christopher? There were certainly incidents that strike us today as dystopian: the execution of women (but not men) for adultery; the rise in witch hunting for example. But the theme encouraged reflection on whether we would understand these times as dystopian in the same way as those who lived through them […]
Connecting past and present: how my history degrees led me into heritage marketing and retail
Below, UoP history alumni Nia Picton-Phillips writes about how her experiences at Portsmouth gave her the skills she needed to succeed in heritage marketing and retail at Chippenham Museum in Wiltshire. Nia studied for a BA and then an MRes in history, researching holocaust memorialisation, with Dr Mathias Seiter as her supervisor. I’ve always had a passion for history and learning about the past, so when I was applying for university and writing my UCAS personal statement, I imagined that I’d spend my career as a historian, completing a PhD, specialising in a particular field, and becoming an expert. Perhaps that is still true in a way, as I’ll never […]
Who do I trust? Analysing local grievances at the start of the French Revolution
Our own Professor Dave Andress has a new journal article published in the latest issue of Historical Journal, “The Language of confiance and the French cahiers de doléances of 1789”, which you can read in full on open access here. With increasing historiographical attention to the emotional content of French revolutionary politics, the unprecedented nationwide consultation that produced the cahiers de doléances of 1789, ‘registers of grievances’, drawn up by localities to the Estates-General convocation, now available as a searchable digitised corpus of four million words, offers a way to explore the hopes, fears, and concerns of thousands of French people who participated in the cahiers’ composition. The article […]