History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | history of science

Peter Misch 5

Peter Misch (1909-1987): a holocaust survivor in wartime China

By on December 16, 2021 in Research in Focus

  On 8 December 2021 our own Dr Rudolph Ng, Lecturer in Global History, presented a fascinating paper tracing the extraordinary journey of a young geologist who fled Nazi Germany in 1936 and then taught for a decade in wartime China, before making a successful postwar academic career in the United States. If you missed the paper, we have a recording available, so do get in touch with one of us (rudolph.ng@port.ac.uk, robert.james@port.ac.uk, fiona.mccall@port.ac.u) Misch’s narrow escapes from the Holocaust and the Japanese invasion of China (1937), his capture by the Chinese Nationalists (1942), and the impending Communist takeover in China (1946) highlight the tumultuous reality of academic pursuits in […]

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International Women’s Day 2021: Katherine Johnson: Mathematician at NASA

By on March 8, 2021 in Public History

To celebrate International Women’s Day, we are delighted that UoP history graduate Ian Atkins has written this profile of pioneering NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson. For International Women’s Day I have chosen to write about Katherine Johnson, NASA mathematician, most famous for her work in calculation of the trajectory for manned space orbits, and subsequent lunar expeditions.[1] Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia on the 26th August 1918. She was the youngest of four children, her mother a teacher and her father an all-purpose odd job man.[2] Katherine had always excelled at maths and was ahead of her class from an early age. Margot Lee Shetterly indicates that […]

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Coping with epidemic disease in the seventeenth century

By on June 30, 2020 in Learning in Focus

Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower [1] One of the first school history projects I can remember doing, before leaving Australia at the age of fourteen, was to create my own facsimile newspaper reporting on the great plague of 1665. Who would have thought at that stage that I would have ended up as a seventeenth-century historian? I spent hours poring over a London bill of mortality, copying the forms of 17th century handwriting and the strange unfamiliar fatal diseases: ‘apoplexie’, ‘ague’, ‘chrisomes’, ‘dropsie’, ‘griping’ in the […]

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