History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | primary sources

ww1 trench

‘Man Up!’: Revisiting the trenches and reviewing First World War masculinity.

“David McCracken’s dissertation was a well-written and outstandingly researched piece of work. It conducted a rigorous interrogation of current First World War historiography and deployed a broad range of evidence, from infantrymen’s diaries and letters to memoirs and oral testimony, to evaluate how soldiers coped with life in the trenches. David put forward a multi-layered gender analysis that revealed how complex British society’s perceptions of masculine behaviour were during the conflict. It was an excellent dissertation that shed light on a crucial aspect of modern history.” – Dr Rob James, L6 Year Tutor. I set out to explore the impact that the First World War had upon the construction of […]

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leeds-armitage-retribution

Using Visual Sources: Edward Armitage’s Retribution (1858)

Rozene Smith, a second year history student at the University of Portsmouth, wrote the following blog entry on how historians can use Retribution (1858) to reflect on representations of the British Empire for the Introduction to Historical Research Unit.  The unit is co-ordinated by Dr Jessica Moody, Lecturer in Modern History and Heritage at Portsmouth. Studying a “Museum of Empire” unearths a reality of the British Empire as a cornucopia of peoples and cultures, and an ‘archive’ equally monumental and multifarious.[1] W. J. T. Mitchell championed the ‘pictorial turn’ and the resurgent ubiquity of images in what became an increasingly visual-oriented culture.[2] The work in question is that of Edward Armitage, student of […]

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