Student Projects
Insight into some of the creative projects that students have been working on as part of their History degree.
Revealed: How South Yorkshire migrants joined the gold rush to Australia
Uncovering the history of how South Yorkshire workers followed the gold rush to Australia is the focus of a new project between Sheffield Hallam University and La Trobe University.
The online project, 'Mining, Migration and Municipal Identity: South Yorkshire and Victoria during the Gold Rush and Industrialisation' examines the history of migration from South Yorkshire and the fates of those migrants who made the perilous journey across to Australia during the 1850s.
Examining issues of identity and culture together, 18 students from across both universities have worked together to produce projects focussing on a range of topics including the consumption of absinthe in underworld drinking dens in Melbourne, the origins and design of the Australian national flag and the journey of one migrant, John Dickinson, from South Yorkshire to St. Arnaud.
John Dickinson (1829-1887), from the Dickinson family album
John Dickinson was an agricultural labourer from Campsall near Doncaster who found his way to St. Arnaud, Victoria where he made his fortune selling goods to miners on the goldfields. More than 100 years later, John's great-great-great-great, grandson, Thomas Amos, a fourth-year student from La Trobe University, worked on the module with Sheffield Hallam students.
John Dickinson Known Movement on the Victoria Goldfields: 1. Cathcart (January 1857); 2. Pleasant Creek (1858); 3. Mountain Hut (near Amphitheatre) (November 1859); 4. St. Arnaud (December 1859 – August 1887).
Thomas said: “There were a couple of reasons why I was interested in this subject. My hometown of St. Arnaud was a gold mining town established during the Victorian gold rush.
“I have also recently been studying my family history for another subject, and that was where I learnt that my great-great-great-great-grandfather, John Dickinson, originated from Yorkshire!”
Tony Taylor, professor of history at Sheffield Hallam University, said: “The project really made me think about the interconnected nature of the world and the degree to which cultures overlap - even during the period of the steamship and the telegraph.”
Taught by Joe Stanley and Tony Taylor from SHU and Emma Robertson and Charles Fahey from La Trobe, the new collaboration is the latest part of the Global Strategic Partnership, officially established in 2019 between both Sheffield Hallam and La Trobe. The aim of the partnership is to provide students with an international learning experience, to work collaboratively on research and innovation projects with global impact, and to share good practice and innovative approaches to higher education.
Here is a project written by one of our first year students Libby Quince. Students are asked to write a piece on an aspect of Sheffield history using local archives. This project highlighted the role of the suffrage movement in Sheffield in the years immediately before the First World War.
Women and the Vote in Sheffield
For our Making History module, my group focused our Sheffield project on the women’s suffrage movement in the city during the 19th and early 20th century. The movement was pivotal in giving women access to the same rights as men in society, with some women gaining the vote in 1918. This project enables those in Sheffield and the surrounding area to engage in this captivating aspect of their own community’s heritage. Our project focuses on a selection of photographs of the suffrage movement designed to capture events and reactions as they occurred. The primary source I selected is a photograph of a march of ‘law-abiding suffragettes’ as they left Pinstone Street in Sheffield in 1913. The photo was taken during the height of the suffrage campaign before the First World War.
Caption: N.U.W.S.S The Suffrage Pilgrimage leaving Sheffield via Pinstone Street, Sheffield, 1913, s02941. Picture sheffield
The image, taken by a photographer from Sheffield Newspaper Limited, is useful to historians as it captures events first hand. However, there are limitations to the source. For example, we do not have any further details photographer and what they chose to, and chose not to, capture. Suffrage campaigners in the North were radical in their aim for equality and appealed to women of all social classes. Harold Smith refers to them seeking “complete gender equality rather than just equal suffrage rights” (The British Women’s Suffrage Campaign, 1866-1928 (Routledge, 2014), p. 38). This photograph is highly valuable to anyone studying or interested in votes for women because metaphorically a picture tells a thousand words.