History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | family history

Histories of Adulthood in Britain and the United States

In November 2024 our own Dr Maria Cannon published an edited collection Adulthood in Britain and the United States from 1350 to Generation Z in the Royal Historical Society’s New Historical Perspectives series published by the University of London Press.   Laura Tisdall, Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University, was Maria’s co-editor. The collection looks at how ideas of adulthood have changed over the centuries and addresses two central questions: who gets to be an adult, and who decides? The chapters in the collection cover more than 600 years and two continents and are focused around four key themes: adulthood as both burden and benefit; adulthood as a relational category; collective versus individual […]

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Name and shame: how I reclaimed a lost identity

The history blog is very pleased to host this guest blog.  In it Jeremy Schultz explains the reasons behind his grandfather’s decision to change his Jewish surname at the outset of World War II, and his own recent decision to change his name back again.  Jeremy is a psychotherapist, and the brother of Deborah Shaw, Professor of Film and Screen Studies at the University of Portsmouth.  Jeremy’s family history illustrates many of the historical issues encountered by our history students in their study of twentieth-century history: the pogroms in Tsarist Russia that drove many Jews to emigrate; racial prejudice during the 1930s against Jews in both Germany and Britain; the […]

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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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