History@Portsmouth

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Playing Ally Pally!

In this blog, Mike Esbester, Senior Lecturer in History at Portsmouth, updates us on recent progress on the Railway Work, Life & Death project, including a new project partner, international collaboration, engagement with audiences beyond the academic – and on taking the project to out to a huge new venue. Alexandra Palace is an iconic venue – and not somewhere I’d envisaged taking a history research project: yet at the end of the month, that’s exactly where I’ll be with the Railway Work, Life & Death project! We’ll be exhibiting at the Family Tree Live show, a huge family history fair taking place on 26 and 27 April this year. […]

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Making collaborative research … more collaborative!

In this blog, Dr Mike Esbester, senior lecturer in history at Portsmouth, discusses your chance to get involved in the research project he co-leads, looking at safety and accidents on British and Irish railways at the start of the 20th century. Mike’s research and teaching focus on the everyday, including ideas about mobility and accidents in modern Britain.   One of the great aspects of the ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project, which I co-lead with colleagues at the National Railway Museum in York (NRM) and the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick (MRC), has been its collaborative nature. As well as working across institutions and professional boundaries […]

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Health and Safety in Contemporary Britain

New Publications | Dr Mike Esbester, Senior Lecturer in History, has just published a book with Professor Paul Almond on Health and Safety in Contemporary Britain: Society, Legitimacy and Change since 1960. The book charts the development of modern British health and safety, in response to ideas around risk society, managerialism, regulatory capitalism, and demographic and economic changes in the workplace. Mike’s research focuses on the cultural history of safety, risk and accident prevention in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Health and Safety in Contemporary Britain – Society, Legitimacy, and Change since 1960 | Paul Almond | Palgrave Macmillan To read more about the book, click here.

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History Research Seminars Winter/Spring 2019

Every year, the History team at Portsmouth organise a series of research seminars that take place across the autumn, winter and spring terms. Historians are invited from a range of institutions, both in Britain and abroad, to talk about their latest research projects. The subjects presented cover a broad historical timespan and offer insight into a diverse range of topics. In this winter and spring terms there will be talks on children’s writing in 1930s Britain, relationships in early modern England, immigration in Tudor Southampton, the Royal Marines’ institutional legacy, and the health of British seamen while travelling overseas. All are welcome to attend. All talks take place in Milldam […]

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Seventeenth-century fortifications found at University of Portsmouth archaeological dig

Some of Portsmouth’s historic fortifications are being uncovered in two trenches on the site of the new University of Portsmouth Sports Facility in Ravelin Park. The walls that have been revealed would have protected the naval port during the 17th century, a major period of development for the port.  A gun platform or embrasure has now been uncovered by the archaeologists, AOC archaeology. See the most recent article on the project in the University of Portsmouth News

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A Festival of Dark Delights: Portsmouth DarkFest 2018

Dr Karl Bell, Reader in Cultural and Social History, discusses the launch of this year’s Portsmouth DarkFest. Karl researches ‘everything spooky’, and his second book was on the Victorian legend of Spring-Heeled Jack. He’s now working on a book on proto-science fiction ideas in British culture between c.1750-1900. This weekend sees the return of Portsmouth DarkFest, an annual creative and cultural festival that explores the supernatural, the spooky and urban noir. Now in its third year, the festival originally grew from my historical research into nineteenth-century ghost stories in Portsmouth. I was particularly interested in the power of folkloric stories and the way haunted locations can change our understanding of both […]

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