History@Portsmouth

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Learning in Focus

The Valentine's Day love letter

Love, courtship and ‘personal sources’ in late medieval England

By on February 14, 2018 in Learning in Focus

Dr Maria Cannon is a Lecturer in Early Modern History and specialises in late medieval and early modern family history. She co-ordinates the Level 5 core unit ‘Introduction to Historical Research’ where students are introduced to the range of historical sources available for their independent research and the kind of issues associated with using different types of evidence. In this blog she reflects on one of the examples discussed under the theme of ‘Personal Sources’. In February 1477 a young woman from a Norfolk gentry family wrote to the man she was engaged to marry. Margery Brews greeted her fiancé John as ‘my ryght welebeloued Voluntyne’, the earliest surviving use […]

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http://fotos.patrimonionacional.es/biblioteca/ibis/pmi/Inventario_1623/imp/th_00000015.jpg

History is not always written by the winners

By on January 26, 2018 in Learning in Focus, New Publications, Research in Focus

Dr Katy Gibbons is Senior Lecturer in History, and specialises in the religious and cultural history of 16th century England and Europe. She teaches amongst other units, a Special Subject ‘Conflict, Conspiracy, Consensus? Religious Identities in the Reign of Elizabeth I’, which covers some of the themes addressed in the article below. The article for this blog accompanies a publication in the international journal Etudes Episteme. 2017 has seen a range of events to mark the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation (http://www.reformation500.uk/). Celebrations have been conducted in ways that deliberately avoid confessionalised interpretations of the past, including efforts at mutual dialogue between the Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-37827736), […]

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Skylark launch

Using Oral Sources: Recovering the history of the Skylark rocket

By on January 17, 2018 in Learning in Focus

Daniel Millard, a second year History student at the University of Portsmouth, wrote the following blog entry on how historians can use oral history testimony to reflect on Britain’s attempts to enter the ‘space race’ in the late-1950s for the Introduction to Historical Research Unit.  The unit is co-ordinated by Dr Maria Cannon, Lecturer in Early Modern History at Portsmouth. In 1957 Britain entered the space race with the launch of the Skylark sounding rocket. Conceived at a time when the nation was seeking to develop ballistic missile capabilities Skylark quickly positioned itself as a valuable research tool with which to help scientists unlock secrets from above the Earth’s upper atmosphere. […]

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View of Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight, etching by Wenceslas Hollar, 1643, British Museum Print Q, C.100

Portsmouth and the English Civil Wars

By on December 14, 2017 in Learning in Focus

Dr Fiona McCall teaches a third year special subject on the British Civil Wars.  Below she looks at events in Portsmouth which give it a good claim to be considered the place where the Civil War broke out. Hampshire saw considerable action during the First Civil War (1642-6), being sandwiched between the area of Parliamentary control in the South and East, and the South-West, which was controlled by the Royalists for most of the first war.   One of the first major sieges took place here at Portsmouth, and one of the last, further north at Basing. Other notable actions occurred at Winchester, at Alton church, Cheriton, and just over the […]

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The execution of the eight surviving conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot. Wellcome Images via Wikimedia , CC BY-SA

Forget gory Gunpowder – Jacobean England had a bloodcurdling appetite for violence

By on November 3, 2017 in Learning in Focus, Research in Focus

Dr Katy Gibbons, Senior Lecturer in History, has published an article in The Conversation. Here she reflects on responses to the violent scenes in the recent BBC 1 series Gunpowder, in particular the depictions of executions of Catholics by the Protestant authorities. This discussion reflects her research interests in early modern Catholicism in England and Europe, which is one theme in her final year special subject unit, ‘Conflict, Conspiracy, Consensus: Religious Identities in Elizabethan England’. To read the article, click here

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1960s-recipe-book-1

‘Fodder for the masses’: Student recipes in the 1960s

By on October 19, 2017 in Learning in Focus, Research in Focus

Dr Jodi Burkett is Principal Lecturer in History at the university, and teaches across the undergraduate course including a special subject on ‘Students and Youth in postwar Britain’. She is currently doing research on student activism around issues of ‘race’, racism and anti-racism between the late 1960s and early 1990s which includes reading a lot of student newspapers. While waiting in an epic queue in the Hub, or eating your Co-op meal deal, I’m sure many of you have asked yourselves: What did students eat in the late 1960s? For many undergraduate students, going to University is the first time that they are living on their own and having to cook […]

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