Dr Rob James, Senior Lecturer and Course Lead for the MA Naval, Maritime and Coastal History, has recently published an article, co-written with one of the MA’s alumni students, Martin Backhouse, in the journal War in History. The article, ‘Un-silencing “The Most Silent Section of ‘The Silent Service’’’: The Portrayal of Royal Navy Submarines and Submariners in the Illustrated London News, 1939-1945’, examines the portrayal of Royal Navy submarines and their crews in the world’s first weekly illustrated newspaper, the Illustrated London News, during the Second World War. It argues that the newspaper depicted Britain as having a technologically advanced and potent submarine service, whose personnel were part of an […]
Archive | New Publications
New Publications
Disorderly baptisms in mid-seventeenth century England
Baptism is as a rite of central importance within the Christian religion. Deriving from the Gospels, it was one of only two of the original seven Catholic sacraments retained by English Protestants. In late-sixteenth and seventeenth century England, with high birth rates, and everyone required to attend church by law, it was a very familiar ritual, commonly performed before the congregation on a Sunday. It also generated much controversy, over its precise theological meaning, as well as the way, time and place in which it should be conducted. During the English Civil Wars of the 1640s, many of the existing practices of the English Church was challenged and reformed, including […]
The challenges faced by Catholics under Queen Elizabeth I
UoP History’s Katy Gibbons has recently published a chapter in volume 1 of the Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism. This major multivolume work seeks to explore the complex and contested stories and experiences of Catholic communities in Britain and Ireland across 5 centuries, and to bring together aspects of their stories that are often approached separately. Katy’s contribution explores the many challenges faced by Catholics in England, Wales and Ireland in the reign of Elizabeth, and how their responses were shaped by the specific local, national and international context. In particular, it considers the linguistic, political, ecclesiastical and legal frameworks in which Catholics negotiated their existence as […]
Rehabilitating Exchange Alley: why it was possible to trust eighteenth-century stock-brokers
On 26 April 2023 Professor Anne Murphy, Executive Dean of the Humanities and Social Science here at the University of Portsmouth, presented her paper on the nature of trust in financial markets in the eighteenth century. If you missed the paper, the recording is available to watch here. You will need the following password r?Qo7xmt to access the recording. An abstract for Anne’s paper can be found below. Anne’s latest monograph, Virtuous Bankers: A day in the life of the late eighteenth-century Bank of England, which presents an in-depth study of the eighteenth-century Bank of England at work, is published on 9 May 2023. For more details, please follow this […]
Jewish Historians and the Construction of Regional Identities during the German Empire
Dr Mathias Seiter, Principal Lecturer and Subject Area Lead for History, has recently published an article in the journal German History on the importance of regional identities for Jews in imperial Germany. See below for the abstract, and if you want to read the article, click here. Abstract: The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a wave of interest in history among Jews in Germany. The popularity of the subject extended to those who lived at the geographic margins of the German Empire, in the Prussian Province of Posen and the Reichsland of Alsace-Lorraine. Living in borderlands in which national identities were contested, Jewish historians established and joined […]
Pompey: Champions of England: A research collaboration between the History team, students and Pompey History Society
In this blog, our Rob James, Senior Lecturer in History, discusses the local history project he worked on with one of our local community partners, Pompey History Society, that culminated in the publication of a book which includes a chapter written by Rob and four of our History students, Sam Ewart, Maria Kopanska, Dan Ward and Jack Woolley. Rob’s research explores society’s leisure activities and feeds into a number of optional and specialist modules that he teaches in the second and third year. On 26 October 2022, I attended the launch of the book POMPEY Champions of England: The sporting and social history of Portsmouth FC’s league title wins […]