History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | diaries

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Not so merry England: a Swiss visitor comments on Elizabethan criminal justice

English people tend to think highly of our long-established legal system.  But as second-year student Liam Fisher explains, visitors from Europe didn’t always see things the same way.  Liam’s blog is based on work he did for the second-year module: Underworlds: Crime Deviance and Punishment: 1500-1900, taught by Fiona McCall and Brad Beaven. The English justice system during the early-modern period was iconic both socially and politically, ingrained into English culture and minds as something to be proud of. While the wider European population were no strangers to barbaric forms of punishment, the extent of English glorification and creativity of punishment would no doubt come as a shock to outsiders.  […]

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Coping with epidemic disease in the seventeenth century

Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower [1] One of the first school history projects I can remember doing, before leaving Australia at the age of fourteen, was to create my own facsimile newspaper reporting on the great plague of 1665. Who would have thought at that stage that I would have ended up as a seventeenth-century historian? I spent hours poring over a London bill of mortality, copying the forms of 17th century handwriting and the strange unfamiliar fatal diseases: ‘apoplexie’, ‘ague’, ‘chrisomes’, ‘dropsie’, ‘griping’ in the […]

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Using Personal Sources: President Truman and the Cold War

Erika Hoffmann, a second year History student at the University of Portsmouth, has written the following blog entry on US President Harry Truman’s diary entries for the Introduction to Historical Research module. Erika demonstrates how these diary entries can be seen as the starting point for the Cold War paranoia that set in within the West in the post-Second World War era. The module is co-ordinated by Dr Maria Cannon, Lecturer in Early Modern History at Portsmouth. Harry Truman’s presidency was marked by the start of the Cold War. This blog will focus on two diary entries of Harry Truman, three months into his United States presidency. The diary entries […]

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