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 […]
Guest writers Derek Morris and Ken Cozens tell us about how their in-depth studies of East London have led to over ten years of research and four ground-breaking books. Dr Richard Blakemore in 2014 observed that “The riverside parishes of eastern London and the lower Thames were home to the largest maritime community in Britain from […]
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 […]
