In The Myth of the Press Gang, J. Ross Dancy offers a quantitative approach to the subject. He developed a sampling system and entered the details as recorded in individual ships’ muster books covering the period 1793-1801. Data entry took twenty two weeks. The end result was a database including 27,174 individuals, “roughly a 10 […]
The naval town of Portsmouth, located on the south coast of Britain, had a rich cinema culture in the early 20th century. At the peak of the leisure habit’s popularity in the 1930s and 1940s, the town was home to 29 cinemas. These ranged from the plush ‘picture palaces’ to the smaller, rudimentary cinemas. The […]
One of the elements that attracted me to the University of Portsmouth BA (Hons) History course was the department’s links with local museums, galleries and other heritage ventures. The course also has a strong emphasis on social and cultural history. The University is ideally placed on the doorstep of Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. Two months into […]
Portsmouth women played a major role in the care of sick and injured Royal Navy sailors during the seventeenth century. Women’s importance to naval health care became, paradoxically, a reason to justify an important shift: from care in private homes to care in private naval hospitals. From about 1650, naval health care in England operated […]
In May, I participated in a conference in Bordeaux, Self, other and elsewhere: Images and imaginaries of the port cities of Atlantic and Mediterranean Europe (1700-present). [1] One particularly animated panel on the second day, “The taboo of the trade,” concerned how French ports such as Nantes and Bordeaux itself were coming to terms with […]
In the first of a two part series, this month Isaac offers a web-essay exploring ‘New Scholarship on the Press Gang.’ “When I undertook a PhD project on sailors back in 1993, work on impressment per se was scarce. One of the more memorable works had been published in 1913. The secondary literature that is available […]
