Tag: navies

‘Ports Cities in Comparative Global History’: Team members collaborate with researchers in Hong Kong

Earlier this month, a number of team members visited Hong Kong to participate in a series of institutional visits and present at an international conference on ‘Port Cities in Comparative Global History’ at Hong Kong Baptist University. To find out more about the conference, read this excellent blog by one of our PhD researchers, Charlotte Steffen, who presented their paper ‘Beyond China Town- The Multi-national Migration of Chinese Students in Europe’ on the second day of the event. The link to Charlotte’s blog is here.

Prof Brad Beaven introducing the Port Cities and Maritime Cultures research centre.

Drs Tam Ka Chai, Melanie Bassett, Katon Lee, Robert James and Matthew Heaslip.

June 30, 2023
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.

January 5, 2023
‘”Bandied about for a place of refuge”: Extreme Weather, Coastal Shipping and the Loss of Lord Nelson, Liverpool 1840.’

On 19 October 2022 our own Dr Cathryn Pearce, Senior Lecturer in Maritime History, presented at the first History research seminar of this academic year with a thought-provoking paper looking at the grounding of the coastal brig Lord Nelson at Liverpool, UK, and the civic and social responsibility for seafarers and the shipwrecked in a port dominated by shipping interest. If you missed the paper, the recording is available on the Port Towns and Urban Cultures website here (scroll down to find Cathy’s paper).

October 26, 2022
Bridging the gap between the academic and non-academic worlds II: Making research accessible

In this blog Dan Squire, who graduated with a History degree from Portsmouth in July (well done, Dan!), discusses a project he worked on last 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. Dan and his fellow students interviewed our Dr Mel Bassett, who researches the history of dockyard workers, to find out how she has tried to engage the wider public in the history she studies.

As part of our work for the module ‘Working with the Past’, I and a few of my fellow students interviewed Dr Melanie Bassett about how and why historians interact with the public. Mel gave us many insights into her personal experiences of interacting with the public, addressing the concerns many historians have when showcasing their work to the public. Mel spoke about tackling issues such as keeping the public engaged in historical discussions and the different methods that can be utilised to achieve this goal. Mel also went on to stress the importance of accessibility and how technology can play a significant role in facilitating a shift to a more connected historical dialogue between the public and historians.

Mel has employed various methods to capture the public’s interest by making History accessible and enjoyable for everyone involved. One outreach project that Mel was involved in, called Sickly Slums and Sailortowns, is an excellent representation of how historians can expand their audience. The project introduced children to their local history as they discovered what life was like for the port towns’ inhabitants. The workshop culminated in a tour around Portsea, finishing in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, giving participants a first-hand experience of their local history as they even got to sit in a hammock on board HMS Warrior! This outreach project offered a fantastic taster day into History with the primary aim of capturing the interest of the participants. Exposing History to children at an early age can only be a good thing. Not only will it give them more of an appreciation for the subject, it will also help them develop an understanding of the world they live in.

Mel encapsulated her attitude towards working with the wider public when she told us “It is a really exciting time to be a historian; being able to work in the public eye and showcase what it is we do.” Mel feels that historians have the ability to help people gain a sense of topical issues by giving context to events. This was particularly evident when Mel highlighted the importance of other aspects of her research, particularly relating to the British Empire and its implications on today’s society. Mel has examined how the Empire affected ideas of race and belonging within Britain, demonstrating how historians can help by using their research to answer the bigger questions that the public ask.

Making History accessibility is, Mel said, a major issue for historians who are looking to engage a wider audience. Mel spoke about the role that she had played in digitising part of the National Museum of the Royal Navy‘s collection, which involved creating online exhibitions to go on their website. Online exhibitions enable the public to view resources hidden away in the museum’s archives, which are often not on display in the museum due to a lack of physical space. This means that the public can have full access to all the possible exhibits that the museum has to offer.

Mel also discussed another side of accessibility: the need to understand that people do not always want to be lectured to; it is important, Mel said, to allow people to see the collections themselves and do things in their own time. Modern technology has also allowed more traditional written History to become more accessible. As well as writing longer academic-focused pieces, many historians now engage with the public by writing shorter, more reader-friendly posts. Therefore, the public can digest the information in a condensed way.

Mel also offered her thoughts on improving accessibility in the future, pinpointing the fact that we need to empower the wider public by giving them the tools they need to further their own research if they wanted to. This raises an interesting argument about online archives. Although theoretically they are now more accessible than ever due to them negating geographical restrictions, members of the public are often met with new restrictions in the form of paywalls on many sites, meaning online archives are only available to people who can afford to pursue their interest in history.

Finally, Mel spoke to us about her experience of working on the TV programme Britain’s Most Historic Towns. While being positive about the involvement of documentaries and TV shows in History, Mel also mentioned the dangers a historian can face working with the media. Mel was acutely aware of the fact that any time you offer your expertise or opinion, there is always the potential for someone to disagree. This highlighted the difficulty of expressing a view in a 10-minute segment on TV that has been built up through years of research and critical thinking. Mel went on to say that if historians were given longer to contribute, they could add more information to help contextualise their views and lower the chance of their point being misunderstood.

Overall, Mel was extremely positive about working with the wider community and says that making History more available to the public can on be a good thing. It is clear then, that Mel’s aim as a historian is to encourage the wider public to explore and engage with history more freely. Her research is a very important part of her job, she says, but so is helping to create a new generation of historians.

October 18, 2022
History Research Seminars 2019-20

Each year, the History team at Portsmouth organise a series of research seminars that take place across the autumn, winter and spring terms. Historians are invited from a range of institutions, both in Britain and abroad, to talk about their latest research projects. The subjects presented cover a broad historical timespan and offer insight into a diverse range of topics. In this year’s programme there will be talks on schooling in interwar London, naval wives in the nineteenth century, life cycle rituals in the early modern period, European shipbuilding in the eighteenth century, and anti-racism campaigns in twentieth century Britain, and lots more besides. All are welcome to attend. The location of each seminar will be confirmed in promotional material nearer the time.

Autumn term 2019

October 9: Hester Barron, University of Sussex, ‘Classroom Communities: London’s Elementary Schools, 1918-39’

November 13: James Davey, University of Exeter, ‘A Tale of Two Sailors: Richard Parker, Jack Crawford and Britain’s Age of Revolution, 1793-1801’

December 11: Catherine Sloan, Oxford University, ‘The a-la mode style of writing: Writing, Race and Nationality in English Schools, 1850-1900′

Winter/Spring term 2020

January 15: Melanie Holihead, Cambridge University, ‘Sailors’ women’s survival in nineteenth-century society: “Enormous Void of Ignorance” and “remarkable naval effort”’

February 12: Christian Hogsbjerg, University of Brighton, ‘Remembering an anti-racist victory: The Stop The Tour campaign at 50’

****CANCELLED****March 11: Emily Vine, Queen Mary, ‘Birth, death and domestic religion in London, 1600-1800’****CANCELLED****

April 22: Katherine Parker, National Maritime Museum, ‘Charting and printing the Straits: The maps of the Narbourgh expedition (1669-1671)’

May 13: Ida Jorgensen, University of Portsmouth, ‘National navy, international shipbuilding: Technology transfer in 18^th century European shipbuilding’

June 17: David Hope, University of Newcastle, ‘Consumption by a frozen sea: The Hudson’s Bay Company’s servants and material culture in the British Atlantic, c. 1780-1820’

We look forward to welcoming you to the seminars.

October 4, 2019
Forlorn remnant of a runaway King

In this blog, the first in a series of posts by the History team looking at sites of historical interest in Portsmouth, David Andress, Professor in Modern History at Portsmouth, reveals the fascinating history of King James’s Gate, an almost-unique monument to a monarch who fled the country he ruled. Dave specialises in the history 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. He 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.

Around a hundred metres from the home of University of Portsmouth’s History team, there stands an intriguing marker of historical change.

King James’s Gate

King James’s Gate is now little more than an ornament on the boundary of the United Services Sports Ground, but when it was erected in 1687, it was one of the principal entrances to Portsmouth’s state-of-the-art fortifications, and a symbol of resurgent absolutist monarchy.

The gate crowned by weeds

King James II had come to the throne in 1685, succeeding his brother Charles II, and seeing off a rebellion led by his illegitimate nephew the Duke of Monmouth. The fate of the rebels gave to English history the legend of the ‘Bloody Assizes‘ and the merciless ‘hanging judge’ Jeffreys, who was made Lord Chancellor after presiding over more than 300 executions and 800 deportations. Four years later, Jeffreys would die in the Tower of London, after King James had fled the country in the face of invading Dutch forces, invited by the Protestant political elite in what became known as the ‘Glorious Revolution’.

James’s short and catastrophic reign, marked by fear of the imposition of Catholicism, left Portsmouth’s gate as an almost-unique relic of his rule. Inscribed in Latin ‘Jacobus Secundus Rex A Reg III A Domi 1687’ – King James II in the third year of his reign, the year of our lord 1687 – it formed part of the modernisation of Portsmouth’s defences as England’s foremost naval port, and literal gateway to a global empire.

As Duke of York under his brother’s reign, James II had been a noted naval commander, serving as titular head of the navy as Lord High Admiral (and Governor of Portsmouth), and directing naval strategy through two Anglo-Dutch wars in the 1660s and 1670s. He was also a leading figure in the Royal African Company, a state-backed slave-trading enterprise.

Naval campaigning in these wars united control over such activities with expansion of territory in the Americas, where the colony of New York was named in James’s honour after being captured, as New Netherland, from the Dutch. Under Charles II and James II, English settlements in the region were united into Viceroyalties under authoritarian governors, with the clear aim of expanding them as tightly-controlled subsidiaries of royal rule. The Glorious Revolution saw local settlers regain autonomy that they would continue to fight for down to the American Revolution – while also, of course, continuing to expand their slaveholding practices.

The gate that now stands rather forlornly on Burnaby Road is thus an emblem of a different absolutist vision of British Empire, that would nonetheless have been held together by the strength of the Royal Navy just as the post-1689 one was. Its architecture became something of an embarrassment in the late nineteenth century, and it was dismantled in the 1860s and kept in storage for several decades before being re-erected on its current site.

English Heritage information panel

For more information on the gate’s history follow this link

July 26, 2018