Elliott Thomas’s enthusiasm for and seriousness about history was apparent to from the time I first taught him in his first year of studies, and he has contributed several pieces for this blog. For his dissertation he looked at the role of charismatic figures Joseph Chamberlain, Alfred Milner, and the writer John Robert Seeley in pushing ideas of radical, racist imperialism which at the turn of the twentieth century led Britain into a devastating conflict in South Africa. Elliott’s supervisor was Professor Brad Beaven. Elliott’s work has got better and better over the three years he has studied with us and it is great to see Elliott give a shout […]
Tag Archives | commodities
Projecting youth, purity and marriageability: students reconstruct sixteenth-century beauty recipes
For their first year module, Beliefs, Communities and Conflicts, 1400-1750, UoP history students are asked to do a practical activity and then write a report about it, reflecting reflecting critically about how it relates to the themes explored in the module. This, the first of two posts, looks at what students learned from trying to reconstruct early modern cosmetics. The tutors on this module were Dr Maria Cannon and Dr Fiona McCall. Rosie Wells chose to adapt the recipe for Rose Lip Balm from Italian doctor Giovanni Marinelli’s Gli ornamenti delle donne (The Ornament of Ladies) (1562) a manual on female beauty containing recipes at first purporting to be taken […]
An African slave trading commodity washed up off the Isle of Wight
Many of our UoP history students take the opportunity to do voluntary work in one of the many museums in Portsmouth or nearby. Second-year UoP History Isobel Turtle started volunteering even earlier. Having decided to defer her university entry, she started working at the Isle of Wight shipwreck centre in 2021. It’s given her lots of unique opportunities to learn how a museum works: highlights have included seeing how a museum becomes accredited by the Arts Council, how grants and funding are secured and used, how exhibitions are created from scratch, working on databasing the collection, helping with visiting school groups and managing volunteers. She has worked her way up […]