The British Group of Early American Historians will hold its annual conference at the University of Portsmouth, 31 August – 3 September 2017. Drawing on Portsmouth’s historic significance as a port town this year’s conference theme is: “Land and Water: Port Towns, maritime connections, and oceanic spaces of the early modern Atlantic World.” Portsmouth was […]
Why Does Naval History Matter? The first question to consider before approaching a response to why naval history matters is: why does any history matter? Before the professionalization of the field in the nineteenth century, the answer to this question seemed fairly obvious; historians “took it for granted that history furnished the basis for a […]
This is a new “table of contents” for the blog. I posted one of these a little more than a year ago, and it was time to update it! You may find this useful to bookmark, or share with someone unfamiliar with the blog. 2016 has been a great year for guest posts and new […]
‘Sailortown’ is often described as a liminal space, the border between land and sea, work and home. Writing in 1923, C. Fox Smith highlighted this with ‘Dockland, strictly speaking, is of no country—or rather it is of all countries.’[1] There are few places where one can see the rise and fall of this phenomenon so […]
On the 11th November Britain will be commemorating Remembrance Day. To mark the event Brad Beaven and Mel Bassett will be talking about their research project ‘Mapping Jutland casualties’ at a ‘Gateways to the First World War’ Conference at the University of Kent. See the programme here: 11th-november-programme This project investigates the impact of the Battle […]
We are delighted to welcome Dr Ryan Handley of the University of Oxford to give a talk on Black Preachers in Georgian Portsmouth. The talk is supported by Dr Jodi Burkett’s Citizenship, ‘Race’ and Belonging (CRaB) network and raises some interesting ideas about migration and cultural clashes in a naval port town. This is especially […]
