History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | eighteenth century

800px-Toby_Fillpot_(BM_2010,7081.1369) cropped

From folk tale to cheap consumer good to object of wonder – the life history of a toby jug

Our new UoP history module, The Extraordinary and the Everyday: People, Places and Possessions, taught by Dr Katy Gibbons and Dr Maria Cannon, studies material evidence – objects, buildings, landcapes – as a starting point for asking questions about the past.  It employs an innovative form of assessment – the object biography, which recognises that material artefacts, just like people, accumulate histories and have their own life-stories to tell, about the meanings and values of the societies that produced, collected or consumed them.  Harry Odgers’ object biography told the complex story of a seemingly simple drinking vessel, a ‘Toby jug’. Objects of the past are incredibly useful and can offer […]

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The Battle of Culloden

The domestic colonisation of eighteenth-century Scotland

Third year student Kathryn Watts chose an original focus for her dissertation in investigating the eighteenth century attack on Scottish culture. As she argues below, colonialism is often looked at in the global context, but the domestic colonialism of Scotland (and Ireland) predated it, and provided a prototype for many of the colonialist ideas of racial hierarchy and methods of cultural indoctrination which followed.  It has been fascinating supervising Kathryn’s dissertation journey – ed. On April 16, 1746, the bloody battle of Culloden ended with Jacobite defeat; the rebellion of Bonnie Prince Charlie, crushed. This date became synonymous with the decimation of Highland culture, as pro-Government forces sought to destroy […]

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Women in Totnes church 620 x 320

New conference: Disruptions and Continuities in Gender Roles and Authority, 1450-1750

The new Disrupted Authority research group at the University of Portsmouth – SASHPL are organising an interdisciplinary conference linking issues of gender and authority in the early modern period, to be held at Portsmouth on the 29-30 June 2020.  One keynote speaker will be Professor Ann Hughes, from Keele University, whose book Gender and the English Revolution is essential reading for those wanting to understand issues of gender in the seventeenth century.  There is a call for papers for academics and postgraduates, across a range of disciplines, to send in abstracts for potential twenty-minute papers to present at the conference. If you want to know more, see the conference webpage […]

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Hilditch and Sons teapot c. 1825

Using Material Culture: 19th Century British Porcelain Teapot

Adam O’Leary, a second year History student at the University of Portsmouth, wrote the following blog on the 19th century British Porcelain teapot for the Introduction to Historical Research Unit. In the blog Adam discusses the ways in which historians can use sources such as this to better understand society’s attitudes and assumptions in the 18th and 19th centuries. The unit is co-ordinated by Dr Maria Cannon, Lecturer in Early Modern History at Portsmouth.  British ceramics are some of the most common artefacts found on archaeological sites of the later 18th and 19th centuries, and have rightly been the subject of considerable archaeological attention internationally. [1] In this blog, the reasons […]

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Image taken from Miskito Hatchet in British Museum collection httpwww.britishmuseum.orgresearchcollection_onlinecollection_object_details.aspxobjectId=669732&partId=1.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend: An examination of the relationship between the Miskito and the British.

“Abigail based her study on engagement with, and critical examination of, a wide range of sources, from secondary ones to printed Calendars of government records and original Treasury Papers which revealed expenses for gifts to the Miskito to ensure a positive relationship. Extant artefact and pictorial evidence, though scant, was also employed. There was adept use of cartography and consideration of the three Miskito rulers brought to England – ‘The Prince’ brought to England at some point in the 1630s by Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick, ‘Oldman’ here in 1655 and George, in England c. 1774 –November 1776, before becoming King of the Miskito. Written in a clear, confident […]

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