History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Author Archive | Jessica Moody

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Student Photography Competition – Winners Announced!

It gives us great pleasure to announce the winners of 2017’s student photography competition. We received over 40 entries and were blown away by the creativity and standard of these. There were so many which showed different and dynamic sides to Portsmouth and student life. We’d like to thank everyone who entered. The winners are as follows: FIRST PLACE: Dominic Coombs for his photograph of a Swan Boat on the Canoe Lake, Southsea SECOND PLACE: Joseph Long for his photograph of Portsmouth’s nighttime cityscape THIRD PLACE (joint): Katy Hodges for her photograph of the Yomper Statue, Royal Marines Museum, at Dusk Oliver Stedman for his photograph of a skateboarder at […]

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#Outreach: A case study of the Portsmouth History Centre’s Outreach.

“Nicola’s dissertation was a fantastic piece of original and innovative research. Drawing on a wide base of archival and museums literature, Nicola’s dissertation shone a light on the outreach initiatives of local authority archives (an area which has not received a great deal of attention in comparison to community archives) and used the Portsmouth History Centre as an in-depth case study. Nicola’s original analysis of social media alongside ‘traditional’ forms of outreach illuminated both the benefits and drawbacks of current practice and provided a basis for sound suggestions for future initiatives.” – Dr Jessica Moody, Nicola’s dissertation supervisor. My dissertation was inspired by my volunteering role within the Portsmouth History […]

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Using Visual Sources: Edward Armitage’s Retribution (1858)

Rozene Smith, a second year history student at the University of Portsmouth, wrote the following blog entry on how historians can use Retribution (1858) to reflect on representations of the British Empire for the Introduction to Historical Research Unit.  The unit is co-ordinated by Dr Jessica Moody, Lecturer in Modern History and Heritage at Portsmouth. Studying a “Museum of Empire” unearths a reality of the British Empire as a cornucopia of peoples and cultures, and an ‘archive’ equally monumental and multifarious.[1] W. J. T. Mitchell championed the ‘pictorial turn’ and the resurgent ubiquity of images in what became an increasingly visual-oriented culture.[2] The work in question is that of Edward Armitage, student of […]

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How to ‘forget’ difficult pasts: slavery, memory, and the maritime frame

In Theresa May’s ‘Brexit speech’, on January 17th 2017, the prime minister suggested that Britain’s “history and culture is profoundly internationalist” [1]. This is certainly one way of framing Britain’s historic relationship with the rest of the world. Alternatively, you might suggest that May spelt “centuries of colonial rule, oppression, slavery and genocide” wrong. As cultural sociologist Iwona Irwin-Zarecka argues, the range of possible interpretations of historic events and themes can be limited through processes of ‘framing’ [2]. Such ‘framing’ doesn’t necessarily block out other possible interpretations, but it does act to restrict the range of meanings. The past can be ‘framed’ in certain ways, and certain interpretations and narratives […]

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Using Official Sources: The Chadwick Report (1843)

Rozene Smith, a second year history student at the University of Portsmouth, wrote the following blog entry on how historians can use The Chadwick Report (1843) to understand 19th century social reform for the Introduction to Historical Research Unit.  The unit is co-ordinated by Dr Jessica Moody, Lecturer in Modern History and Heritage at Portsmouth. The nineteenth century witnessed an obsessive fixation on empirical and factual data, culminating in a fetishisation of valuable official documents.[1] Consecutive parliamentary acts passed in this period secured centralised funding for official state record-keeping and began the process of establishing a governmentally-sanctioned Public Record Office.[2] Between 1832 and 1846, over one hundred Royal and Parliamentary commissions […]

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