A level studies in history and media led Damiana Kun to focus her Portsmouth history dissertation on how a patriarchal screen industry has ignored modern research and continued to attach negative stereotypes to one of history’s most famous and complex women. Damiana’s supervisor was Dr Maria Cannon. Whether someone has a deep interest in history or not, many remember the six wives of the Tudor King Henry VIII by the old English nursery rhyme: “Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived.” However, in popular culture, Anne Boleyn is perhaps the best known out of the six wives, as the one who supplanted a long-time wife and queen and set a nation […]
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Learning in Focus
Liberation Route Europe goes live
By Fiona McCall on September 25, 2025 in Learning in Focus, Public History, Research in Focus, Uncategorized
As part of their second-year module, Working with the Past, second-year history students have been involved with Liberation Route Europe producing the first UK trails for LRE, including one in Portsmouth, highlighting Second World War remembrance sites and stories. This went live over the summer, and was featured by the BBC and Radio Solent. The Community in War-Scarred Portsmouth Route takes in a number of sites in Portsmouth including the Royal Garrison Church.
The misrepresentation of Catherine De’ Medici’s female rule
For her third-year dissertation UoP history student Sadie White looked into representations of the French Queen Catherine de’ Medici, one of several late-sixteenth century female rulers famously denounced by John Knox in his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558). As Sadie describes, Catherine, foreign, from a family considered inferior in status to the French monarchy, no great looker, and barren for the first ten years of her marriage, has had a hard press over the years, both in her own time, and still today, as represented in contemporary TV and film drama. She is a salutary reminder of how female rule continues to be […]
How white South Africa obstructed the decolonisation of Southern Africa during the Cold War
This is our second piece by second-year UoP history student Elliott Thomas, who has come a long way since I taught him in his first year at Portsmouth. As you might guess from his choice of topics, Elliott has his sights set on a career in the foreign office! On 4 May 1978, at the refugee camp of Cassinga, in Southern Angola, Namibian refugees ran out to greet the planes they thought were sending supplies gathered by Sam Nujoma (the president of the Southwest Africa People’s Organisation, SWAPO).[1] Instead of supplies however, they were greeted by an astronomical amount of explosive ordinance, delivered by the South African Airforce, a total […]
The end of the age of steam and the birth of the modern railways after World War II
Connor Law, as you can see from his picture below, is clearly like a railway buff, so he picked the right dissertation supervisor in our own ‘Mr Trains’ Dr Mike Esbester. His dissertation looked at imperatives to modernise the British railway system after a period of stasis during the war. My dissertation was an analysis of the scope of modernisation on the railways of Britain as the zenith of steam came to a bitter end in 1939 at the start of the Second World War, to the eventual end of steam in 1968. The main argument this study sought to lend support to was that, overall, modernisation on Britain’s railways […]
‘Jazzed Up’: the origins and impact of jazz in America
Miles Orr’s dissertation explored the origins of jazz by examining the lives and lyrics of three key African-American artists: Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Bolden. Miles’s supervisor was Dr Lee Sartain, who has a special interest in Louisiana’s history – see his recent blog post on Louisiana’s civil rights activism. Miles is continuing to master’s study, where he will research Louis Armstrong’s life and influence in more detail. Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Bolden – African Americans who were part of an era of racial segregation, music and culture. This dissertation aimed to explore and uncover the origins of jazz music in America, tracing it back to its African roots […]