History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | visual sources

Schwarz cropped

Creating an identity through clothing: a Renaissance merchant’s fashion book

By on June 14, 2024 in Learning in Focus, Research in Focus

For the second year UoP History 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.  Sadie White chose a sixteen-century German fashion book. Described as “The First Book of Fashion,” Matthäus Schwarz of Augsburg’s Klaidungsbüchlein or Trachtenbuch or “Book of Clothes” is a fascinating object.[1] This object biography explores Schwarz’s reason for producing this book, entangling ideas of self-reflection linked to the Renaissance, the importance of clothes and the idea of sentimentality. It will explore the book’s lifecycle and how someone’s relationship with an object can change its function and importance. Throughout, […]

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poll tax 2 cropped

A photograph in a riot: How much can we believe?

By on February 27, 2024 in Learning in Focus

Photographs provide compelling insight into the past, but can we trust them to give an accurate depiction?[1]. Second-year UoP history student Becky Platt shows how a photograph seemingly showing an argument between a woman and a protestor during the poll tax riot in London in 1990, is shown to have a very differing story from the account of the woman in the picture. It is a great example to discuss how far we can believe a photograph to depict an event accurately. Becky originally wrote this piece for the 1st year history module Traces of the Past: Exploring Lives Through Sources. The photo portrays a man and woman arguing with […]

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fawkes-flook resized

Charting the major milestones of the Space Race: Wally Fawkes and the satirical cartoon

By on March 23, 2023 in Alumni, News, Research in Focus, Uncategorized

On 1 March 2023 the renowned jazz musician and cartoonist Wally Fawkes passed away aged 98. In his long career, Fawkes illustrated satirical cartoons for The Daily Mail under the pseudonym ‘Trog’. His most famous creation was the comic-strip ‘Flook’, but his illustrative work increasingly focused on British politics. In this blog, alumnus student Daniel Millard discusses Fawkes’ role in familiarising the British public with the country’s role in the ‘Space Race’ during the Cold War years. Daniel interviewed Fawkes as part of his research for his undergraduate dissertation, ‘Exploring together: how curators, correspondents and cartoonists presented the Space Race to the British public, 1957-1975‘. Daniel graduated with a first-class BA […]

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d-day story 1

Researching the letters of Allied service personnel in WW2: A student podcast

By on January 5, 2023 in Employability, Learning in Focus, Public History, Research in Focus, Uncategorized

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.

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Poster from the Alexander Korda filk Knight without Armour

“There are no revolutions in well-governed countries” – British film and the Russian Revolution

By on February 1, 2021 in Learning in Focus, Research in Focus

In this blog, Rob James explores how the events of the 1917 Russian Revolution impacted British film production in the mid-twentieth century. Rob tells us that the chance of a film being made depicting those tumultuous events depended on how they were presented. If the film demonstrated any sympathy towards the revolutionaries, then a ban was inevitable. Rob’s research covers society’s leisure activities and how they were shaped and controlled from both within and outside the entertainment industry. His research feeds into a number of optional and specialist modules that he teaches in the second and third year. In the 1934 film Princess Charming, produced by Michael Balcon, one of […]

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The Battle of Culloden

The domestic colonisation of eighteenth-century Scotland

By on June 25, 2020 in Learning in Focus, Research in Focus

Third year student Kathryn Watts chose an original focus for her dissertation in investigating the eighteenth century attack on Scottish culture. As she argues below, colonialism is often looked at in the global context, but the domestic colonialism of Scotland (and Ireland) predated it, and provided a prototype for many of the colonialist ideas of racial hierarchy and methods of cultural indoctrination which followed.  It has been fascinating supervising Kathryn’s dissertation journey – ed. On April 16, 1746, the bloody battle of Culloden ended with Jacobite defeat; the rebellion of Bonnie Prince Charlie, crushed. This date became synonymous with the decimation of Highland culture, as pro-Government forces sought to destroy […]

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