History@Portsmouth
University of Portsmouth's History Blog
Second-year UoP student Mandy Wrenn discusses a 1846 engraving showing a large group of men playing football in the centre of the town of Kingston in Surrey, and the contemporary concerns over the control of urban spaces and popular leisure activities it reflects. This piece was originally written for the Fear and Fun module, taught […]
Brad Beaven has a new blog published on the Social History Society’s blog, looking at the history of ‘sailortowns’, seaport’s urban quarters where sailors would stay, eat, drink and be entertained. These were transient and liminal spaces and a unique site of cultural contact and exchange. Despite the rich array of research areas in class, […]
In this post, Karl Bell, reader in cultural and social history, talks about his new book Supernatural Cities: Enchantment, Anxiety and Spectrality, bringing together scholars from across the globe working on the relationship between supernatural beliefs and urban cultures. He describes what the book is about, and what he learned from the process of international […]
In this blog, Dr Katy Gibbons, Senior Lecturer in History at Portsmouth, reports on a field trip undertaken as part of her Special Subject Module, ‘Conflict, Conspiracy, Consensus: Religious Identities in Elizabethan England’. One of the challenges of researching a society that is several hundred years removed from our own is in understanding the physical […]
“Nilay’s dissertation demonstrated an excellent breadth of reading and a confident grasp of the historical and social issues. It made great use of the Gothic as a cultural lens, using it to explore the changing nature of urban anxieties in Victorian London. Based upon an impressive range of primary evidence, Nilay developed a compelling argument […]