History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | urban history

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Urban football as a nineteenth-century blood sport

Second-year UoP student Mandy Wrenn discusses a 1846 engraving showing a large group of men playing football in the centre of the town of Kingston in Surrey, and the contemporary concerns over the control of urban spaces and popular leisure activities it reflects. This piece was originally written for the Fear and Fun module, taught by Dr Rob James and Dr Karl Bell. The primary source is set in 1846, at a time of continued transition in Victorian Britain from the past to modernity. The depiction of the game, with a large crowd of men playing a game of football in the centre of a town, will have been received […]

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Sailors Ashore: The Exploration of Class, Culture and Ethnicity in Victorian London by Brad Beaven

Brad Beaven has a new blog published on the Social History Society’s blog, looking at the history of ‘sailortowns’, seaport’s urban quarters where sailors would stay, eat, drink and be entertained.  These were  transient and liminal spaces and a unique site of cultural contact and exchange. Despite the rich array of research areas in class, race and gender relations that these districts have to offer, sailortowns have tended to be overlooked in historical study.  This is because they sit at the cross-roads between the urban and maritime realms, and have tended to fall between these two schools of history. Brad writes about his new article published for the journal Social […]

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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 academic collaboration. In my most recent book I brought together and led an international group of scholars in an exploration of magic, monsters, ghosts and storytelling in urban cultures around the world.  Examining these ideas from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century, Supernatural Cities: Enchantment, Anxiety and Spectrality (Boydell and Brewer, 2019) challenges […]

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Enriching the learning experience: Exploring Tudor heritage in Southampton

In this blog, Dr Katy Gibbons, Senior Lecturer in History at Portsmouth, reports on a field trip undertaken as part of her Special Subject Module, ‘Conflict, Conspiracy, Consensus: Religious Identities in Elizabethan England’. One of the challenges of researching a society that is several hundred years removed from our own is in understanding the physical and material aspects that seem so different – the places in which people lived and interacted with each other, the clothes they wore, the objects they owned, and the meanings that were invested in them. This might be particularly challenging when thinking our way into religion and religious experience, and grasping the ways in which […]

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Where the shadows lie: The Gothic in early-mid and late nineteenth-century London.

“Nilay’s dissertation demonstrated an excellent breadth of reading and a confident grasp of the historical and social issues. It made great use of the Gothic as a cultural lens, using it to explore the changing nature of urban anxieties in Victorian London. Based upon an impressive range of primary evidence, Nilay developed a compelling argument for the ways in which Gothic ideas and images crossed over from sensationalist fiction to inform Victorian social investigation. His analysis of the anxieties surrounding Victorian prostitution was particularly rich and sophisticated.” – Dr Karl Bell, Nilay’s dissertation supervisor. I became interested in researching the Gothic and its links to Victorian Britain from a natural […]

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