As part of their second-year module, Working with the Past, second-year history students have been involved with Liberation Route Europe producing the first UK trails for LRE, including one in Portsmouth, highlighting Second World War remembrance sites and stories. This went live over the summer, and was featured by the BBC and Radio Solent. The Community in War-Scarred Portsmouth Route takes in a number of sites in Portsmouth including the Royal Garrison Church.
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Research in Focus
National Archives podcast – People of the Railways
As part of the nation-wide series of events to mark two hundred years of the railways, The National Archives of the UK ‘On the Record’ railway-focused podcast invited our own Dr Mike Esbester in as an expert. Together with archivists, Mike drew on his research and 25 years of using The National Archives to discuss early railway travellers and their experiences, and railway accidents, drawing on Mike’s work for the Railway Work, Life & Death project. The podcast is available here.
The misrepresentation of Catherine De’ Medici’s female rule
For her third-year dissertation UoP history student Sadie White looked into representations of the French Queen Catherine de’ Medici, one of several late-sixteenth century female rulers famously denounced by John Knox in his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558). As Sadie describes, Catherine, foreign, from a family considered inferior in status to the French monarchy, no great looker, and barren for the first ten years of her marriage, has had a hard press over the years, both in her own time, and still today, as represented in contemporary TV and film drama. She is a salutary reminder of how female rule continues to be […]
The end of the age of steam and the birth of the modern railways after World War II
Connor Law, as you can see from his picture below, is clearly like a railway buff, so he picked the right dissertation supervisor in our own ‘Mr Trains’ Dr Mike Esbester. His dissertation looked at imperatives to modernise the British railway system after a period of stasis during the war. My dissertation was an analysis of the scope of modernisation on the railways of Britain as the zenith of steam came to a bitter end in 1939 at the start of the Second World War, to the eventual end of steam in 1968. The main argument this study sought to lend support to was that, overall, modernisation on Britain’s railways […]
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 […]
‘Jazzed Up’: the origins and impact of jazz in America
Miles Orr’s dissertation explored the origins of jazz by examining the lives and lyrics of three key African-American artists: Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Bolden. Miles’s supervisor was Dr Lee Sartain, who has a special interest in Louisiana’s history – see his recent blog post on Louisiana’s civil rights activism. Miles is continuing to master’s study, where he will research Louis Armstrong’s life and influence in more detail. Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Bolden – African Americans who were part of an era of racial segregation, music and culture. This dissertation aimed to explore and uncover the origins of jazz music in America, tracing it back to its African roots […]