On Wednesday 9 February Dr Gemma Masson (University of Birmingham) presented a paper in our History Research seminar series on the history of the development and changes to the name of the city of Istanbul. As well as explaining the constructions of these names, the paper placed developments in the city’s name within the context of their times. […]
Tag Archives | global history

Peter Misch (1909-1987): a holocaust survivor in wartime China
On 8 December 2021 our own Dr Rudolph Ng, Lecturer in Global History, presented a fascinating paper tracing the extraordinary journey of a young geologist who fled Nazi Germany in 1936 and then taught for a decade in wartime China, before making a successful postwar academic career in the United States. If you missed […]

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 […]

Building Supernatural Cities
In this post, Karl Bell, reader in cultural and social history, talks about his new book Supernatural Cities: Enchantment, Anxiety and Spectrality, bringing together scholars from across the globe working on the relationship between supernatural beliefs and urban cultures. He describes what the book is about, and what he learned from the process of international […]