History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | media

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Telling tales about the Past

The celebrated historian Natalie Zemon Davis died recently.  In this post, our own Dr Katy Gibbons looks at how second-year students studying the ‘Debating the Past’ module, translated her most famous work into other media: emojis, memes and poetry! What role does story telling play in history writing? How far can historians use their own imagination when discovering and relaying the stories of people in the past? This is one of the many questions that we engage our students with as they look in depth at historiography, and think about how historians ‘do’ history.  In our second year core module, ‘Debating the Past’, one of the texts that might be […]

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‘More diverse and culturally inclusive’: Post-war immigration and its impact on British culture

In this blog, recent BA (Hons) History with Politics graduate Phil Matthews reflects on the impact immigration has had on British culture in the post-Second World War era. Phil, who wrote the blog as part of his assessment for the second year module ‘Working with the Past’, coordinated by Dr Mike Esbester, describes how many aspects of British culture changed as a result of mass immigration into the country in the latter half of the twentieth century. Britain, Phil notes, transformed into a multi-ethnic society and benefitted massively from immigrants bringing their own country’s cultures with them. The twentieth century normalised the multi-cultural society that we live in today, Phil […]

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