History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | twentieth century

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(Un)safe heritage?

By on August 31, 2018 in Learning in Focus, Public History

In this post, the third in our series of blogs looking at sites of historical interest in Portsmouth, Mike Esbester, Senior Lecturer in History at Portsmouth, explores what might be learnt from an apparently unexceptional piece of the city’s built environment. Mike’s research and teaching focus on the everyday, including ideas about mobility and accidents in modern Britain. Not far from my office, there’s yet another mundane object that for most of the time, most people don’t notice – for 140 years it was part of the background to life around Burnaby Road. For a week or so earlier this year, however, it became very noticeable – particularly its absence, […]

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Going to the cinema? The changing uses of Portsmouth’s cinema buildings

By on August 24, 2018 in Learning in Focus, Public History

In this blog, the second in a series of posts looking at sites of historical interest in Portsmouth, Dr Rob James, Senior Lecturer in History, discusses the changing uses of the city’s cinema buildings. Rob specialises in researching society’s leisure activities and teaches a number of units on film and the cinema, including, as part of the Problems and Perspectives unit, ‘History at the Movies’ in the first year, ‘The Way to the Stars: Film and cinema-going in Britain, c. 1900-c. 2000’ option in the second year, and a Special Subject on ‘Cinema-going in Wartime Britain, 1939-1945’ in the third year. Going to the cinema was an important leisure pastime […]

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carry on brussels

“It’s all been a lot of fun really”: Concerns over modern television and the future of comedy programmes

By on August 10, 2018 in Research in Focus

Daniel Reast is an MRes History and BA (Hons) History and Politics graduate from the University of Portsmouth. He has written for the IAFOR Online journal and Portsmouth Postgraduate Review on the subject of comedy history, as well as his own blogs and website discussing politics and society. In this blog Daniel reflects on the development of television comedy in the modern era and asks whether it can be as ground-breaking as comedies from the so-called ‘Golden Age’of the 1970s and 1980s. In May of this year, Channel 4 was proud to present Carry on Brussels: Inside the EU, a short documentary series following the European Parliament in its daily […]

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“There comes a time when you’ve just gotta’ be a man”: An analysis of shifting on-screen representations of British masculinity in the post-Thatcher period

By on July 10, 2018 in Research in Focus

“Sam’s dissertation was an outstandingly researched piece of work. It synthesised contextual and historiographical issues regarding masculinity and film in the post-Thatcher era in a conceptually interesting way, and made great use of visual sources as a cultural lens from which to understand anxieties surrounding changing concepts of masculinity in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Sam demonstrated an excellent understanding of film culture, not just in the period studied, but across the twentieth century, and the way in which he revealed how certain masculine filmic archetypes were shaped and modified in response to the shifting contemporary climate was nothing less than compelling.” – Dr Rob James, Sam’s dissertation supervisor. […]

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The story of Lucky Jim and Twinkletoe: Is the material culture of folklore providential or problematic for the historian?

By on June 28, 2018 in Learning in Focus

Daniel Millard, a second year History student at the University of Portsmouth, wrote the following blog on the toy mascots carried by Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown on the first Transatlantic flight for the Introduction to Historical Research Unit. Daniel discusses the ways in which we can use these items of material culture to ask better questions of the past. The unit is co-ordinated by Dr Maria Cannon, Lecturer in Early Modern History at Portsmouth. Next year will see the centenary of the world’s first Transatlantic flight. For the historian this offers an exciting opportunity to re-acquaint with two notable aviators from the twentieth-century. I refer, of […]

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“One of the Spaniards Fighting Their Own Battles: A Nationalist Soldier on the Santander Front in a Captured Concrete Dug-Out with ‘Marxist’ Inscriptions—’Death to Spain! ‘ and ‘Long Live Russia’.” Illustrated London News, 20 Nov. 1937, p. 893. The Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842-2003, http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/6YJha8.

Soviets and the Spanish Civil War

By on June 18, 2018 in Learning in Focus, Research in Focus

Rory Herbert, final year History student and President of the History Society at the University of Portsmouth, has written the following blog on Soviet involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Rory is Gale Ambassador at the university and contributes to The Gale Review Blog. The role of the Gale Ambassador is to increase awareness of the Gale primary source collections available to students at their university. The University of Portsmouth Library hosts a large collection of Gale primary sources which History students can use when undertaking archival research for their dissertations and other research projects. Rafael Merry del Val (1865-1930) remarked in his manuscript on the Spanish Situation, written for […]

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