On 19 October 2022 our own Dr Cathryn Pearce, Senior Lecturer in Maritime History, presented at the first History research seminar of this academic year with a thought-provoking paper looking at the grounding of the coastal brig Lord Nelson at Liverpool, UK, and the civic and social responsibility for seafarers and the shipwrecked in a […]
Tag Archives | health and safety
Accidents on the railways: A story of heartbreak and loss
University of Portsmouth History student Jenny Leng produced a blog for the Railway Work, Life & Death project as part of her work on the second year core module ‘Working with the Past’, coordinated by Mike Esbester. Mike co-leads the RWLD project along with Karen Baker (Librarian, National Railway Museum) and Helen Ford (Manager, Modern […]
Health and Safety in Contemporary Britain
New Publications | Dr Mike Esbester, Senior Lecturer in History, has just published a book with Professor Paul Almond on Health and Safety in Contemporary Britain: Society, Legitimacy and Change since 1960. The book charts the development of modern British health and safety, in response to ideas around risk society, managerialism, regulatory capitalism, and demographic […]
Looking backwards – and forwards
In this post, Mike Esbester, Senior Lecturer in History, outlines student and staff work with an external partner to mark a significant anniversary. Mike’s research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, particularly on the cultural history of safety, risk and accident prevention, and on the history of mobility. When people hit a big milestone age […]
History & practice – images of wellbeing
In this post, Mike Esbester discusses how his research into the history of communicating health and safety messages is linked to a current initiative to promote wellbeing and better awareness of mental health at work and beyond. ‘History is more or less bunk’. So Henry Ford claimed – rather unfairly, I would suggest. There’s a […]
(Un)safe heritage?
In this post, the third in our series of blogs looking at sites of historical interest in Portsmouth, Mike Esbester, Senior Lecturer in History at Portsmouth, explores what might be learnt from an apparently unexceptional piece of the city’s built environment. Mike’s research and teaching focus on the everyday, including ideas about mobility and accidents […]