History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Author Archive | Fiona McCall

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The UoP History Society welcomes new faces

By on October 8, 2021 in Learning in Focus

Below, third year UoP history student Reiss Sims encourages new students to join our student history society. The beginning of a new academic year brings multiple opportunities: the chance to start new modules, to meet like-minded people, to take up a new sport or skill, or perhaps to join a society. Last year, during the height of the pandemic, a few second and third year students decided to take up the task of reviving the university’s History Society. The aim was to simply provide a space which offered students the opportunity to meet an array of people and to discuss the ups, downs, and curiosities of university life. More importantly, […]

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Church and People in Interregnum Britain

By on September 30, 2021 in New Publications, Research in Focus

In this post, UoP senior lecturer in history Dr Fiona McCall talks about her new book Church and People in Interregnum Britain, bringing together new research from scholars across Britain and further afield on the profound religious changes which took place after the British Civil Wars and how people responded to  them. From 1642-5, England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland, endured the first in a series of devastating civil wars, which split communities ideologically, politically and religiously.  These wars have been termed ‘the last of the wars of religion’ by leading Civil War historian John Morrill.[1]  In 1645, as the first Civil War approached its end, and the religious reformists gained […]

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King Charles I – a man of principle, not a “man of blood”?

By on September 24, 2021 in Learning in Focus, Research in Focus

Many people instinctively blame King Charles I for the British Civil Wars. So recent UoP history graduate Connor Scott-Butcher’s decision to use his dissertation to challenge the idea, perpetuated by the regicides, that Charles was a “man of blood”, and the weight of historical argument ranged against him, always seemed to me a risky and provocative proposition.  Below, Connor writes about how he went about his research.  He gave a few sleepless nights to his supervisor, as well as himself, but the result was a balanced and well-structured argument, based around extensive use of contemporary primary sources. – Dr Fiona McCall. My topic for my dissertation was a thorough examination […]

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Empire and its afterlives 2: How do you teach history with primary sources?

By on September 17, 2021 in Learning in Focus, Public History

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 as a board game, a novel, and a series of photographs by a renowned photojournalist. Two of the students selected a recruitment poster from the Second World War as their recommended source, but suggested different ways of including it into the English and Welsh curriculum. Drawing on two articles on active remembrance and military multicultural heritage […]

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Empire and its Afterlives 1: Applying the skills of the historian to the present

By on August 9, 2021 in Learning in Focus, Uncategorized

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 History, Politics, International Development, International Relations and Languages. Newly created for the 2020/2021 academic year by Natalya Vince and Tony Chafer, it encouraged students to draw on research from a range of disciplines in order to better understand empires from a historical perspective, their legacies, and the way they are present and represented around us […]

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Zooming in on seventeenth-century elite food culture

By on August 2, 2021 in Learning in Focus, Research in Focus

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 and Dining in Seventeenth-Century England’ looked at how food culture became symbolic of identity, social status, and power during the seventeenth-century. The type of food consumed, how it was consumed, and what it was consumed with, strictly defined which part of the social scale individuals fell in to.  Taking the lead from French food culture, […]

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