History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

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Birmingham Museum Trust tapestry

The Lost Crafts of the Past

As part of their work on the second year core module ‘Working with the Past’, three University of Portsmouth History students – Chanel Parker, Loraya Head, and Gemma Norris – collaborated with Portsmouth Museum and Art Gallery to curate a three-month exhibition that both celebrated the crafts of our ancestors and highlighted the importance of preserving the craftspeoples’ skills for future generations. In this blog, written for Hampshire Archives Trust, Chanel Parker discusses the research methods the group used when curating the exhibition. ‘Working with the Past’ is coordinated by Mike Esbester. To read the blog, click this link.   Slider image courtesy of Birmingham Museums Trust

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Wikimedia Commons

Blackout accidents on Britain’s railways during World War Two

University of Portsmouth History student Evan Cossburne produced a blog for the Railway Work, Life & Death project as part of his work on the second year core module ‘Working with the Past’, coordinated by Mike Esbester. Mike co-leads the RWLD project along with Karen Baker (Librarian, National Railway Museum) and Helen Ford (Manager, Modern Records Centre) with the assistance of Craig Shaw (Volunteer Administrator, NRM). In this blog, Evan looks at the impact of the Second World War on railway personnel’s working conditions, focusing particularly on the accidents caused by a ‘lack of light’. To read the blog, click this link.

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city museum featured image

Enhancing students’ skills and experiences: A Twitter takeover, an exhibition and a podcast

As a team we always encourage our students to enhance their skills while studying for their History degree with us, and one way we do this is by offering them opportunities to work with some of our external partners. In this post, we demonstrate how this is undertaken in one second year core module, ‘Working with the Past, co-ordinated by Dr Mike Esbester. As part of their studies during their History degree, our students have worked with a range of local and international institutions, including the Mary Rose Museum, Lloyd’s Register Foundation,  the D-Day Story archive, Hong Kong Baptist University, and Pompey History Society, and have undertaken a wide variety […]

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the bank screenshot

Rehabilitating Exchange Alley: why it was possible to trust eighteenth-century stock-brokers

On 26 April 2023 Professor Anne Murphy, Executive Dean of the Humanities and Social Science here at the University of Portsmouth, presented her paper on the nature of trust in financial markets in the eighteenth century. If you missed the paper, the recording is available to watch here. You will need the following password r?Qo7xmt to access the recording. An abstract for Anne’s paper can be found below. Anne’s latest monograph, Virtuous Bankers: A day in the life of the late eighteenth-century Bank of England, which presents an in-depth study of the eighteenth-century Bank of England at work, is published on 9 May 2023. For more details, please follow this […]

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cinema in wartime 2 cropped

Bridging the gap between the academic and non-academic worlds III: Sharing local histories

In this blog Josh Wintle, who graduated with a History degree from Portsmouth last year (well done, Josh!), discusses a project he worked on in his second year with some of his fellow History students for the module ‘Working with the Past’, coordinated by Dr Mike Esbester. As part of their project, the students looked into how academic historians take their work ‘out of the academy’ and into the public realm. Josh and his fellow students interviewed our Dr Rob James, who researches leisure history, to find out how he has tried to engage the wider public in the history he researches. The aim of the interviews we conducted with […]

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d-day story 1

Researching the letters of Allied service personnel in WW2: A student podcast

Recently, the internationally-renowned museum, The D-Day Story, published on their website a podcast recorded in 2022 by three second year History students, Amy Deighton, Jessie Rickman and Sam Marchetti. The students, who are now in the final year of their studies, worked with the museum’s archives as part of their assessment for the ‘Working with the Past’ module, coordinated by Mike Esbester. The second-year module encourages students to work with our local community partners where possible and produce work that has a benefit to them and the organisation they are working with. To hear the podcast, go to the D-Day Story website here.

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