In August 1927, nearly 50,000 people flocked to Portsmouth to attend the first Navy Week. Showcasing the power and prestige of the Royal Navy, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, mine-laying monitors, submarines, and an aircraft carrier were all either on view or available for close inspection. Attendees saw HMS Rodney and HMS Nelson, the two most modern […]
My book, Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area, hopefully will be of interest to readers of the Port Towns & Urban Cultures blog. The title proclaims its basic thesis. Though many folks are unaware of it, including a surprising number of labor and maritime historians, the very term […]
Last week I attended the annual Social History Society conference held at the University of Portsmouth. It was my first Social History Society conference, and I was particularly lucky to have the opportunity to present a paper on sailors and naval pageantry alongside my PTUC colleagues Daniel Swan and Chris Spackman on the first panel […]
The Naval Dockyards Society will be holding its eighteenth annual conference on Saturday 29 March 2014 at the Lecture Theatre, National Maritime Museum Greenwich from 11.00-4.45pm. The theme of conference is British Dockyards in the First World War. Commemorating this momentous centenary, the focus on Dreadnoughts and Rosyth is apt, as Dreadnought warships were crucial to […]
