History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | music

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“How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?” – studying Nina Simone and her times

Below Pauline Standley describes the experience of studying for a master’s degree in history (MRes) at Portsmouth.  She looked at the role of Nina Simone as a civil rights activist, a feminist, and someone who reflected the broader socio-political shifts of her time.  Pauline’s supervisor was Dr Lee Sartain. Nina Simone. For many, her name immediately brings to mind her iconic, richly textured voice, often accompanied by signature sounds of the trumpets and piano in timeless classics like “I Put a Spell on You” or “Feeling Good”. While these songs undoubtedly capture her unshakeable legacy, Nina Simone is also a reservoir of intersectional experiences that reveal much about the socio-political […]

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Communal music on board the Mary Rose: the significance and after-life of a shawm

For the second year module, The Hidden Lives of Things, taught by Dr Katy Gibbons and Dr Mary Cannon, for their assessment, students have to produce an ‘object biography’ for a historical artefact.  Francesca Raine chose to look at one of the ten surviving musical instruments found on the Mary Rose and what it can tell us about how sixteen-century people experienced and enjoyed music.     In 1545 the Mary Rose, a Tudor carrack, sank during a confrontation with the French fleet in Portsmouth.[1] The unusual underwater conditions preserved a unique snapshot of everyday Tudor life, revealed in the 20th century, despite earlier excavation attempts in 1545 and 1836-1840.[2] […]

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Coping with epidemic disease in the seventeenth century

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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