History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Archive | Uncategorized

Certificate of Nationalisation cropped

Name and shame: how I reclaimed a lost identity

By on April 7, 2022 in Learning in Focus, Public History, Uncategorized

The history blog is very pleased to host this guest blog.  In it Jeremy Schultz explains the reasons behind his grandfather’s decision to change his Jewish surname at the outset of World War II, and his own recent decision to change his name back again.  Jeremy is a psychotherapist, and the brother of Deborah Shaw, Professor of Film and Screen Studies at the University of Portsmouth.  Jeremy’s family history illustrates many of the historical issues encountered by our history students in their study of twentieth-century history: the pogroms in Tsarist Russia that drove many Jews to emigrate; racial prejudice during the 1930s against Jews in both Germany and Britain; the […]

Continue Reading 6

Smugglers, servants, and students: transporting Catholic materials to post-Reformation England

By on April 4, 2022 in Uncategorized

On 9 March 2022 Dr Aislinn Muller from the University of Cambridge gave a paper in our History Research seminar series, looking at the circulation of Catholic devotional objects in post-Reformation England, a time when acts of parliament had banned them in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century. She assessed the routes by which objects such as rosaries, agnus dei pendants, relics, and portable devotional images were smuggled into the country by merchants, students, and others travelling between England, Ireland, and continental Europe and the extent to which this constituted an act of subversion against the Crown. If you missed the paper, a recording is available here.  You will need the […]

Continue Reading 0
The_Martyrdom_Of_Charles_the_First cropped

Don’t lose your head – surviving a dissertation on King Charles I’s killers

By on March 17, 2022 in Learning in Focus, Research in Focus, Uncategorized

Below, one of last year’s third-year students, Alex Symonds, gives some timely advice on how to survive writing your dissertation.  Alex’s dissertation was entitled “‘Cruel Necessity’: Understanding the Influences on the Commissioners in the Trial of Charles I”.  As Alex’s supervisor, I knew she had it in her to do very well, but my mouth dropped to floor once I began reading her work.  The dissertation was very bold in its arguments with an original central focus on humanising the regicides, as well as those chosen commissioners who chose not to sign the death warrant, who have been far less studied. Alex developed some sophisticated arguments around the role of […]

Continue Reading 0
Women and dress

Exploring the transgressive use of clothing by female groups from the 1920s to the 1970s

By on October 21, 2021 in Learning in Focus, Research in Focus, Uncategorized

Emily Jays graduated in Summer 2021 with a 2:1 in History and Sociology. Her dissertation was titled “Transgressing Gender Norms and National Identities Through Dress: Three 20th Century Case Studies”. This explored how clothing was used by flappers within 1920s America, butch lesbians and transgender women in post-1950 Britain and Muslim women and the veil in French Algeria and modern day France.  She is now studying a Master of Research in Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Portsmouth, with an intersectional approach on the relationship between working-class women, higher education and their habitus. She is about to start the process of applying for PhDs, in which she hopes […]

Continue Reading 0
SCALA_ARCHIVES_1039931700 cropped

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 […]

Continue Reading 0
stop-your-cruel-oppression-of-the-jews-flohri cropped

Jewish persecution in Russia and its influence on Jewish immigration to London

By on April 22, 2021 in Alumni, News, Public History

The history team are excited to learn that recent UoP history graduate Emily Burgess has set up her own consultancy, Midas Tomes, for historical research and writing.  Emily produced an outstanding dissertation on the female South London gang known as the Forty Elephants so it is great to see her prosper! Checkout this blog post from another UoP history graduate Ben Humphreys on the website. https://www.midastomes.com/themidastomesblog/blogpostone   Click here to see previous posts by Ben and Emily on the UoP history blog.    

Continue Reading 0