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Public History

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‘A vital part of any university career’: A student’s experience of taking a placement unit

Ian Atkins, a second year History student at the University of Portsmouth, wrote the following blog entry on his experience of doing a work placement at the National Museum of the Royal Navy Library for the Public History Placement Unit. The unit is co-ordinated by Dr Melanie Bassett, Research Assistant for Port Towns and Urban Cultures and Part Time Lecturer in History. The Public History Placement unit, a vital part of any university career, is an option that is available to Second Year Students in the School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies. Encompassing a wide and varied variability of placements the option aims to give an insight into the […]

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By photographer not identified - This is photograph Q 114833 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums (collection no. 8502-08 [1]), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2872345

Don’t believe everything you read…

Dr Rob James, Senior Lecturer in History, recently worked with a local community group, Portsdown U3A, on a Heritage Lottery Funded project that sought to find out the impact of the Battle of Jutland on the people of Portsmouth and the local area. With the help of research assistant and PhD student John Bolt, and a team of Online Course Developers at the University, Dr James created an online map using the data collected by members or Portsdown U3A. One of the most interesting findings made by the U3A when conducting their research was that one celebrated V.C. holder – Commander Loftus William Jones – was born in Portsmouth, not […]

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BSC First Aid 1972

If you go down to the Archives today …

In this post, Mike Esbester brings us up to date on the book he wrote earlier in the year, marking the 60th anniversary of the British Safety Council – now picked up by The National Archives and health and safety professionals. 2017 marks the 60th anniversary of the British Safety Council, one of the leading organisations aimed at improving health, safety and wellbeing in the workplace, in the UK and beyond. Fortunately the BSC is an organisation attuned to the value of the past, and – as discussed in an earlier post  – has been prepared to put its money where its mouth is, including creating an excellent digital archive , […]

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1914 SM p.38, platelayer edit

The dangers of railway work documented

In this blog, Dr Mike Esbester, senior lecturer in history, provides an update on the ‘Railway, Life & Death‘ project he has been working on in conjunction with the National Railway Museum. A database that details the stories of nearly 4,000 individuals who were killed or injured at work, including 16-year old James Beck, who Mike discussed briefly in an earlier blog (http://history.port.ac.uk/?p=315), is now available online.  Mike’s research focuses on the cultural history of safety, risk and accident prevention in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project has just made available the database of nearly 4,000 individuals killed or injured at work on the […]

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health-safety2

What use is the past?

In this blog Dr Mike Esbester, senior lecturer in history, tackles a question that has long been discussed by historians and reveals how, if used carefully, the past can sometimes provide illumination for the present. Mike’s research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, particularly on the cultural history of safety, risk and accident prevention, and on the history of mobility. It’s not an original question, and historians have been wrestling with it for years. Is it possible to learn from the past, given circumstances and context change and no two situations are ever precisely the same? Do we risk hollowing historical study out by trying to ‘apply’ it to the present? Must […]

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dunkirk

Re-using the past: history on film.

In this blog Dr Rob James, senior lecturer in history, reflects on the issue of ‘truth’ in historical feature films, revealing how filmmakers have frequently used past events to comment about contemporary situations. Rob specialises in researching people’s leisure pursuits, and teaches a number of units on film and the cinema, including his second year option unit ‘The Way to the Stars: Film and cinema-going in Britain, c. 1900-c. 2000’ and the final year Special Subject strand ‘Cinema-going in Wartime Britain, 1939-1945’. As James Chapman has noted in his masterly book Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film, ‘a historical feature film will often have as much […]

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