From a Portsmouth history degree to conserving historic buildings at York
Mature student Mandy Wrenn was a great influence on the younger students while studying history at Portsmouth, and is still in touch with many of them. Below she describes how she describes how she put the skills she had learned during her Portsmouth history studies to good use when she went on to study (and gain a distinction) for a Masters in Historic Buildings at the University of York.
Visit to 17th Century Portsmouth
For the third-year UoP history option Britain in Revolution, students visit Old Portsmouth to see some evidence of Portsmouth’s 17th century history. Here they are outside the house where the Duke of Buckingham was murdered, on the High Street.The Devil’s Highway
Our own Professor Brad Beaven has published a new book about Ratcliffe Highway, the heart of London’s sailortown, which had a notorious reputation for knife crime and immorality in the nineteenth century.
Adulthood in Britain and the United States
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n November 2024 UoP Senior Lecturer Dr Maria Cannon published an edited collection Adulthood in Britain and the United States from 1350 to Generation Z. The collection, published in the Royal Historical Society’s New Perspectives Series with Laura Tisdall of Newcastle University, looks at how ideas of adulthood have changed over the centuries
Wartime representations of Royal Navy submarines in the British press
Dr Rob James, UoP Senior Lecturer and Course Lead for the MA Naval, Maritime and Coastal History, has recently published an article, co-written with one of the MA’s alumni students, Martin Backhouse, in the journal War in History. The article examines the portrayal of Royal Navy submarines and their crews in the world’s first weekly illustrated newspaper, the Illustrated London News, during the Second World War.
64 Parishes: Louisiana’s history of civil rights activism
History at university is all about the detail – but not so detailed as to lose the overall plot. How do people in hundreds of towns and cities across a country combine in order to create a movement? This grassroots approach to the African American civil rights movement has been the recent historical trend – the lives of activists in communities across the nation that form change and may never be heard about by most people but are intimately connected to social revolution and national reform. Lee Sartain, UoP Senior Lecturer in history, writes about the 64 parishes project in Louisiana which records the lives of civil rights activists there, and his own contributions to it.
Realising and communicating a love for history, at Portsmouth and beyond
Ashleigh Hufton is remembered with great affection by the history team as a student who contributed keenly to history seminars from the outset and worked hard to develop her skills further during her studies in history at the University of Portsmouth from 2018 – 2021. Ashleigh has since been enjoying great success teaching history at secondary level. She writes about her studies at Portsmouth, and what she has gained from them since graduating.
50 Years On: the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act
Love it or hate it, you can’t escape it: the Health and Safety at Work Act has been an important part of UK working life (and wider) for 50 years.
To mark its 50th anniversary, a day-long symposium was held in London on 25 November 2024: Health & Safety at Work Act – 50 years on: still fit for purpose?
It was hosted by the Trade Union & Employment Forum of History & Policy, and brought together practitioners, trades unionists and academics – including the University of Portsmouth History team’s Dr Mike Esbester. Mike’s research focuses on histories of safety, risk and accident prevention in modern Britain.