History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Author Archive | Fiona McCall

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King Charles I – a man of principle, not a “man of blood”?

Many people instinctively blame King Charles I for the British Civil Wars. So recent UoP history graduate Connor Scott-Butcher’s decision to use his dissertation to challenge the idea, perpetuated by the regicides, that Charles was a “man of blood”, and the weight of historical argument ranged against him, always seemed to me a risky and […]

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Empire and its afterlives 2: How do you teach history with primary sources?

This is the second post in the Empire and its afterlives series. The introduction can be found here. Primary sources represent a wide range of materials which historians can draw on, and students made the most of this diversity. The podcast episodes included discussions of armed forces recruitment posters, political speeches and pamphlets, as well […]

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Zooming in on seventeenth-century elite food culture

Third-year student Ashleigh Hufton writes about the experience of presenting her undergraduate research at the British Conference of Undergraduate Research.  Because of the pandemic, Ashleigh had to get to grips with presenting on Zoom a process she found nerve-racking but a very worthwhile learning experience.  Ashleigh’s dissertation research, ‘Social Differentiation and the Polite Society: Food […]

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“Let’s start at the very beginning”: an attempt to explain the dissertation and provide reassurance

By James Farrar, final-year history student at the University of Portsmouth.  James’s supervisor Dr Fiona McCall writes: James was an exemplary dissertation student, always ahead of schedule in planning and carrying out his dissertation work, making him ideally placed to advise others on how to go about it.    James’s dissertation, ‘“This creature not deserving […]

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Could Churchill have done more to prevent the holocaust? The evidence of a personal letter

Callum Chinn, now in his final year studying history at Portsmouth, wrote this blog piece for the second-year Introduction to Historical Research module last year.  In it, he examines a letter written by Winston Churchill in July 1944, and what it reveals about the allies’ knowledge of and response to the holocaust. The twentieth century […]

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