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

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 […]

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fawkes-flook resized

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

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 […]

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d-day story 1

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, […]

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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

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 […]

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The Battle of Culloden

The domestic colonisation of eighteenth-century Scotland

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 […]

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