Emily Burgess, who studied for PhD in history at the University of Portsmouth, has had a paper published in Women’s History Review which is free to read here. The paper looks at press depiction of Alice Diamond, leader of the interwar Forty Thieves gang. By mythmaking, framing Diamond as an ‘Underworld Amazon’, ‘Giant’, and ‘Queen of the Terrors’, the press was able to project female gangsterism as a form of ‘internal terror’ to fuel fears over gender, post-war brutalisation and the changing interwar landscape.See a previous post about Emily’s work on London’s female gangsters here. Emily is a graduate of the University, having studied for a BA (Hons) History degree […]
Archive | New Publications
New Publications
Charting The Perilous Deep
Below, our own Karl Bell, Associate Professor in Cultural and Social History, writes about his exciting new book on the supernatural legends associated with the seafarers of the Atlantic Ocean. Karl’s research specialises in supernatural and environmental history, the history of beliefs and mentalities, folklore, and Victorian popular culture, on which he has published extensively. The modules Karl teaches at Portsmouth include a third-year special subject on Magic and Modernity, a new second-year option on The Age of Crisis and Victorian Enchantments for the MA in Victorian Gothic: History, Literature and Culture. My new book, The Perilous Deep – A Supernatural History of the Atlantic (Reaktion Books) offers a different […]
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. You can listen to a recording of Brad talking about the book here. No doubt some of the material from the book will work its way into Brad’s second-year history option, Underworlds: Crime, Deviance and Punishment in Britain 1500-1900.
Histories of Adulthood in Britain and the United States
In November 2024 our own Dr Maria Cannon published an edited collection Adulthood in Britain and the United States from 1350 to Generation Z in the Royal Historical Society’s New Historical Perspectives series published by the University of London Press. Laura Tisdall, Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University, was Maria’s co-editor. The collection looks at how ideas of adulthood have changed over the centuries and addresses two central questions: who gets to be an adult, and who decides? The chapters in the collection cover more than 600 years and two continents and are focused around four key themes: adulthood as both burden and benefit; adulthood as a relational category; collective versus individual […]
Wartime representations of the Royal Navy submarine service in the British press
Dr Rob James, 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, ‘Un-silencing “The Most Silent Section of ‘The Silent Service’’’: The Portrayal of Royal Navy Submarines and Submariners in the Illustrated London News, 1939-1945’, 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. It argues that the newspaper depicted Britain as having a technologically advanced and potent submarine service, whose personnel were part of an […]
Disorderly baptisms in mid-seventeenth century England
Baptism is as a rite of central importance within the Christian religion. Deriving from the Gospels, it was one of only two of the original seven Catholic sacraments retained by English Protestants. In late-sixteenth and seventeenth century England, with high birth rates, and everyone required to attend church by law, it was a very familiar ritual, commonly performed before the congregation on a Sunday. It also generated much controversy, over its precise theological meaning, as well as the way, time and place in which it should be conducted. During the English Civil Wars of the 1640s, many of the existing practices of the English Church was challenged and reformed, including […]