History@Portsmouth
University of Portsmouth's History Blog
Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower [1] One of the first school history projects I can remember doing, before leaving Australia at the age of fourteen, was to create my own facsimile […]
Third year student Kathryn Watts chose an original focus for her dissertation in investigating the eighteenth century attack on Scottish culture. As she argues below, colonialism is often looked at in the global context, but the domestic colonialism of Scotland (and Ireland) predated it, and provided a prototype for many of the colonialist ideas of […]
In his dissertation third-year history student Tim Marsella studied the changing understandings and representations of the role of the Wehrmacht (German armed forces in World War II) within modern Germany. He shows how a landmark exhibition in the 1990s challenged perceptions about the breadth of involvement in war crimes, but also how coming to terms […]
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. […]
The cartoonist David Low’s depiction of Stalin as an octopus, published in 1948, sits within a long-standing tradition of monstrous, dehumanised depictions of political enemies. Octopi in particular have been used in the past to represent the sinister ambitions of Prussia, Britain, France, Nazi Germany, America and the oil industry, amongst others. But as second-year […]
In the light of the worldwide anti-racists protests taking place across the world, two current UoP students, Lois Marriott and Becca Francis, argue passionately for the need to educate young people about the history of black people’s experience of racism. We both chose to take units during our history degree that would help us understand […]