History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | France

memes cropped

Telling tales about the Past

The celebrated historian Natalie Zemon Davis died recently.  In this post, our own Dr Katy Gibbons looks at how second-year students studying the ‘Debating the Past’ module, translated her most famous work into other media: emojis, memes and poetry! What role does story telling play in history writing? How far can historians use their own imagination when discovering and relaying the stories of people in the past? This is one of the many questions that we engage our students with as they look in depth at historiography, and think about how historians ‘do’ history.  In our second year core module, ‘Debating the Past’, one of the texts that might be […]

Continue Reading 0
Together_Art.IWMPST3158 cropped

Empire and its afterlives 2: How do you teach history with primary sources?

This is the second post in the Empire and its afterlives series. The introduction can be found here. Primary sources represent a wide range of materials which historians can draw on, and students made the most of this diversity. The podcast episodes included discussions of armed forces recruitment posters, political speeches and pamphlets, as well as a board game, a novel, and a series of photographs by a renowned photojournalist. Two of the students selected a recruitment poster from the Second World War as their recommended source, but suggested different ways of including it into the English and Welsh curriculum. Drawing on two articles on active remembrance and military multicultural heritage […]

Continue Reading 0
Marseille 1A

Summer vacation 2020: a virtual tour round Marseille

In this post, PhD student and Gale ambassador Megan Ison shows that even under lockdown conditions, our horizons need not be limited, as she takes us on a virtual vacation in France, using Gale primary sources, to get us in the mood for that holiday we plan to take, next year … Summer 2020 – a vacation period with a difference After a busy exam season each May, students up and down the country look forward to long summer vacations. Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, we can’t catch a flight this summer holiday.  Excitingly, Gale Primary Sources, an online database of digitalised primary sources, allows you to still explore your cancelled holiday […]

Continue Reading 0
maxresdefault

La Marseillaise: has the song that unified the French republic become too divisive?

David Andress, Professor in Modern History at Portsmouth, has recently published an article in The Conversation on the recent controversies surrounding the French national anthem, La Marseillaise. Dave is a historian 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. Dave 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. To read the article, click here

Continue Reading 0
“One of the Spaniards Fighting Their Own Battles: A Nationalist Soldier on the Santander Front in a Captured Concrete Dug-Out with ‘Marxist’ Inscriptions—’Death to Spain! ‘ and ‘Long Live Russia’.” Illustrated London News, 20 Nov. 1937, p. 893. The Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842-2003, http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/6YJha8.

Soviets and the Spanish Civil War

Rory Herbert, final year History student and President of the History Society at the University of Portsmouth, has written the following blog on Soviet involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Rory is Gale Ambassador at the university and contributes to The Gale Review Blog. The role of the Gale Ambassador is to increase awareness of the Gale primary source collections available to students at their university. The University of Portsmouth Library hosts a large collection of Gale primary sources which History students can use when undertaking archival research for their dissertations and other research projects. Rafael Merry del Val (1865-1930) remarked in his manuscript on the Spanish Situation, written for […]

Continue Reading 0