Miles Orr’s dissertation explored the origins of jazz by examining the lives and lyrics of three key African-American artists: Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Bolden. Miles’s supervisor was Dr Lee Sartain, who has a special interest in Louisiana’s history – see his recent blog post on Louisiana’s civil rights activism. Miles is continuing to master’s study, where he will research Louis Armstrong’s life and influence in more detail. Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Bolden – African Americans who were part of an era of racial segregation, music and culture. This dissertation aimed to explore and uncover the origins of jazz music in America, tracing it back to its African roots […]
Tag Archives | nineteenth century
Researching the life stories of our local railway workers
In a project sponsored by the university’s Heritage Hub, Dr Mike Esbester has been working collaboratively with members of the Havant Local History Group on the Portsmouth Area Railway Pasts project. This researches the life stories of ten local railway workers from the 1870s to 1939 and relates to the wider Railway Work, Life & Death project database of accidents to railway workers, so this coproductive project has been about taking the accident or mention in the RWLD database as a starting point and going beyond it. In cooperation with The Community Rail Partnership (Hills to Harbour) and the community organisation Creating Chaos they have recently installed interpretation posters at […]
The Devil’s Highway
Our own Professor Brad Beaven has published a new book about Ratcliffe Highway, the heart of London’s sailortown, which had a notorious reputation for knife crime and immorality in the nineteenth century. You can listen to a recording of Brad talking about the book here. No doubt some of the material from the book will work its way into Brad’s second-year history option, Underworlds: Crime, Deviance and Punishment in Britain 1500-1900.
Histories of Adulthood in Britain and the United States
In November 2024 our own Dr Maria Cannon published an edited collection Adulthood in Britain and the United States from 1350 to Generation Z in the Royal Historical Society’s New Historical Perspectives series published by the University of London Press. Laura Tisdall, Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University, was Maria’s co-editor. The collection looks at how ideas of adulthood have changed over the centuries and addresses two central questions: who gets to be an adult, and who decides? The chapters in the collection cover more than 600 years and two continents and are focused around four key themes: adulthood as both burden and benefit; adulthood as a relational category; collective versus individual […]
Collaboration in the Archive
The University of Portsmouth History team’s Mike Esbester has recently had a co-authored open access article published, in Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal. It’s part of a special issue, marking the 50th anniversary of the Modern Records Centre (MRC) at the University of Warwick. The MRC is the major repository for archives of trades unions and employers organisations, with a particular strength in transport collections. Mike has been using the MRC for his research for over 20 years. Over the last five years the MRC has been an integral part of the ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project, as a collaborator and institutional co-lead, alongside the University of Portsmouth and […]
Discovering a railway-worker ancestor
Our own Dr Mike Esbester was featured on BBC 1’s ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ on 5 September 2024, helping Rose Ayling-Ellis learn more about her ancestor’s railway accident. The episode is available to watch on BBC iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0022n0p