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 […]
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Learning in Focus
King Charles I – a man of principle, not a “man of blood”?
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 […]
Empire and its afterlives 2: How do you teach history with primary sources?
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 […]
Empire and its Afterlives 1: Applying the skills of the historian to the present
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 […]
Zooming in on seventeenth-century elite food culture
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 […]
“Let’s start at the very beginning”: an attempt to explain the dissertation and provide reassurance
By James Farrar, final-year history student at the University of Portsmouth. James’s supervisor Dr Fiona McCall writes: James was an exemplary dissertation student, always ahead of schedule in planning and carrying out his dissertation work, making him ideally placed to advise others on how to go about it. James’s dissertation, ‘“This creature not deserving […]