History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

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A Festival of Dark Delights: Portsmouth DarkFest 2018

By on October 16, 2018 in Events, News

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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(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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Forlorn remnant of a runaway King

By on July 26, 2018 in Learning in Focus, Public History

In this blog, the first in a series of posts by the History team looking at sites of historical interest in Portsmouth, David Andress, Professor in Modern History at Portsmouth, reveals the fascinating history of King James’s Gate, an almost-unique monument to a monarch who fled the country he ruled. Dave specialises in the history of the French Revolution, and of the social and cultural history of conflicts in Europe and the Atlantic world more generally in the period between the 1760s and 1840s. He teaches across the undergraduate degree, and currently delivers core teaching on methodologies, as well as contributing his specialist knowledge of eighteenth-century and revolutionary France to first- and third-year modules. […]

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BOSTON, MA - APRIL 21: Chanting, "We're going to stop rape now," a coalition of women's groups gathered in Downtown Crossing in Boston on April 21, 1984, to protest the treatment of the victim in the highly publicized New Bedford barroom rape trial. The demonstration came one month after four men were convicted of raping a 21-year-old mother on a pool table in Big Dan's tavern in New Bedford. The case drew nationwide publicity when police reported that others in the bar cheered during the attack. The trial was broadcast daily on cable television. (Photo by Wendy Maeda/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

A Heritage Lottery Fund Grant for the University of Portsmouth for an Oral History Project on Women’s Activism Since 1960

By on June 8, 2018 in Events, News, Research in Focus

Dr Sue Bruley, Reader in Modern History at Portsmouth, has won a large grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to research women’s activism in Portsmouth since 1960. The project will investigate the many struggles women faced living and working in the naval city. Sue’s research focuses on gender and women’s history in the 20th century, and she teaches a special subject on ‘Gender, Sexuality and War 1922-80’ and an option ‘The First World War, A Social and Gender History’. The University of Portsmouth has been awarded a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £73,300 to research women’s activism in Portsmouth. This project will led by Sue Bruley, Reader in Modern History, […]

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