History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | primary sources

Hans Holbein ship with sailors

Cut-throat communities, angry noblemen, and a noseless pirate! My journey through the joys and horrors of writing a dissertation

Below, the first of a series on this year’s bumper crop of student dissertations, from my own supervisee Tom Underwood.  Tom was one of the most prepared and organised students I’ve ever supervised, but as he mentions below, also still honing his dissertation down to the wire, and we were blown away with the results.  […]

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Census form 1911 cropped

The 1911 census: the government and the suffragettes have a conversation

A 1911 census form provides evidence of the ways in which the suffragettes challenged state authority.  This piece was written by second-year UoP history student Ashleigh Hufton for the second-year module, Danger! Censorship, Power and the People. Forms articulate conversations between two parties, argues Dobraszczyk, in an article on the Victorian census. [1]  A 1911 […]

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Fantine from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, by Margaret Bernadine Hall (1863-1910)

The morality of state intervention in sexually-transmitted disease

Is it appropriate for governments to restrict personal liberty in an effort to control disease? This issue has come very much to the fore in the wake of the current worldwide Coronavirus epidemic.  In this post, Darcy Mckinlay, a second year history student, writes about nineteenth-century arguments against forcible methods of controlling venereal diseases. During […]

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