Below, our own Karl Bell, Associate Professor in Cultural and Social History, writes about his exciting new book on the supernatural legends associated with the seafarers of the Atlantic Ocean. Karl’s research specialises in supernatural and environmental history, the history of beliefs and mentalities, folklore, and Victorian popular culture, on which he has published extensively. The modules Karl teaches at Portsmouth include a third-year special subject on Magic and Modernity, a new second-year option on The Age of Crisis and Victorian Enchantments for the MA in Victorian Gothic: History, Literature and Culture. My new book, The Perilous Deep – A Supernatural History of the Atlantic (Reaktion Books) offers a different […]
Archive | Public History
Public History
Researching the life stories of our local railway workers
In a project sponsored by the university’s Heritage Hub, Dr Mike Esbester has been working collaboratively with members of the Havant Local History Group on the Portsmouth Area Railway Pasts project. This researches the life stories of ten local railway workers from the 1870s to 1939 and relates to the wider Railway Work, Life & Death project database of accidents to railway workers, so this coproductive project has been about taking the accident or mention in the RWLD database as a starting point and going beyond it. In cooperation with The Community Rail Partnership (Hills to Harbour) and the community organisation Creating Chaos they have recently installed interpretation posters at […]
Looking at memorials and practices of memorialisation
For their Thinking Like An Historian module we take our first-year students to look at some of the memorials in Portsmouth, and then they write a piece for their portfolio assessment on a memorial of our choice. Here are some of the memorials chosen by students for further analysis: Memorials in Portsmouth Cathedral Sofia de Freitas Franco chose the Historic Windows located in the north wall of the Quire and the south wall of the Navy Aisle of Portsmouth Cathedral. She finds stained glass windows a rather beautiful way to commemorate lost lives. Each of these different windows represent a different historical figure who were very significant in their […]
“In God is our trust” – How evangelical Christians became so crucial to Trump’s Republican Party
Elliott Thomas is a second-year history student at the University of Portsmouth, and studied modern US history with Dr Lee Sartain as part of the first-year World Histories module. In the wake of Trump’s presidential victory, he discusses how the evangelical Christians and the Republican Party came to be so closely aligned. In the early hours of November the 6th, the victorious Republican president elect Donald Trump would give his victory speech to a crowd of his supporters, who would soon break out into the popular Evangelical hymn “How Great Art Thou”.[1] Despite being mired in controversy, including being put on trial for paying hush money to cover up an […]
64 Parishes: Recording Louisiana’s history of civil rights activism at grass-roots level
By Lee Sartain, Senior Lecturer in History. History at university is all about the detail – but not so detailed as to lose the overall plot. How do people in hundreds of towns and cities across a country combine in order to create a movement? What is it that affects their everyday lives in order for them to become a movement? This grassroots approach to the African American civil rights movement has been the recent historical trend – the lives of activists in communities across the nation that form change and may never be heard about by most people but are intimately connected to social revolution and national reform. […]
50 Years On: the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act
Love it or hate it, you can’t escape it: the Health and Safety at Work Act has been an important part of UK working life (and wider) for 50 years. To mark its 50th anniversary, a day-long symposium was held in London on 25 November 2024: Health & Safety at Work Act – 50 years on: still fit for purpose? It was hosted by the Trade Union & Employment Forum of History & Policy, and brought together practitioners, trades unionists and academics – including the University of Portsmouth History team’s Dr Mike Esbester. Mike’s research focuses on histories of safety, risk and accident prevention in modern Britain. Some of that has […]