BA (Hons) History with Public History

This module explores the multiplicity of contacts which have shaped the last half millennium of global history. Empire and religion, commerce and colonialism, race and space, and disease and healing all drove and moulded the encounters between distant cultures that created our modern world. This module explores some of these global connections, from trade and the exchange of goods and ideas, to practices of violence and resistance. The module will introduce students to core and emerging debates and approaches within the field of global history.

The module will contain five four-week blocks on various topics within modern global history. The History department will publish a list of five blocks each year, from at least the following:

• Germany’s African Road to the Holocaust
• Global Sports and the African Diaspora
• The Ottoman Empire in European History
• (De)Colonising Enlightenment Political Thought
• Mosquitos, Microbes and Empire
• Latin America and the World Market
• Travellers, Stories, Materials and Knowledges across Eurasia
• Colonialism, Anti-colonialism and Resistance in the Middle East and North Africa

This module introduces students to a range of historical controversies in order to engage them in a critical manner with competing perspectives on a range of different issues and events. The module will contain six three-week blocks on various sub-disciplines within history, including, social, cultural and political history, across different periods and geographic areas. Throughout, it will focus on work on historiography, considering issues such as: the influence of issues contemporary to authors on their writing; the impact of authors’ politics and/or wider values system on their work; the evolution of controversies over time; and theoretical explanations of controversies. In addition, it will take a comparative approach to controversies, with student assessment including an option to compare two historical controversies or to analyse one controversy in more depth. Lectures and seminars at the beginning and end of the module, and at the point of handover from one block to another, will discuss comparative themes. The History Department will publish a list of six blocks each year, from at least the following:

1. Acts, Identities and the Origins of Homosexuality
2. The Causes of the Russian Revolution
3. The Greatest Whodunit in History: Who Caused the First World War?
4. The Decline of the Liberal Party in the UK and the Rise of Labour
5. Guilty Men? British Appeasement Policy and the Causes of the Second World War in Europe.
6. The Ballot or the Bullet? Civil Disobedience in 1960s Protest Movements
7. Revolutionary Movements in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s
8. Fire in Babylon: The New Cross Fire and the Black People’s Day of Action
9. The Unnatural Disaster of Hurricane Katrina

This module provides guidance on how to develop and perfect the skills students need to write an undergraduate-level history essay. An emphasis is put on the centrality of problem solving and critical thinking, demonstrating how essays should be used as vehicles to explore academic debates.  Students learn skills specific to the discipline of history, such as identifying primary and secondary sources, evaluating their suitability and analyzing them to answer historical questions, as well as those necessary for academic work in other disciplines and for employment, including relevant referencing techniques, planning to meet deadlines, analyzing data, making a clear argument, using relevant technologies in research and presentation of data, working in groups and making oral presentations.

For deep learning to take place, students practice the skills they have learnt by completing a series of structured tasks that contribute to a summative essay engaging with a specific historical problem. They will receive feedback on each stage of the process, enabling them to develop and improve their skills. The module is taught with a narrow focus on the lived experience of a defined group of people during a specified historical period (for example the working life of South and East Londoners in the mid-Nineteenth Century) depending on the expertise of the member of staff running the module. Some sessions concentrate on the knowledge required, others on how to apply this knowledge to solve a given historical question.

The module also provides specific guidance on the preparation for history examinations.

Historical Perspectives introduces and explores ‘historiography’, this being the history of the study of the past and the writing of history. Spanning a period from the Renaissance to the present day, the module examines key methods, theories, approaches, and writers so as to provide an introduction and orientation to the development and evolution of academic history.

As academic history continues to develop, topics on the module will be updated in line with new perspectives. Core topics will be from a selection of the following:

• Antiquarian and Humanist approaches to history
• Leopold Ranke and ‘Rankean’ ideas about history
• Historical Materialism and Marxist interpretations of history
• Annales school techniques such as ‘Total History’ and ‘Microhistory’
• Gender as a category of historical analysis
• Sexualities as an area of historical research
• Post-colonial and non-colonial histories
• Global History and challenges to Eurocentricity
• Postmodernism and ‘truth’ in history
• The History of Medicine and Medical Humanities
• The History of Emotions
• Black British History

A 60-hour placement, normally one 6-hr day a week for 10 weeks, in a partner institution from the museums, archives or heritage sector.

Ten 2-hr lecture/seminar blacks, held weekly in term 1, addressing various issues related to public history and how concepts of the past are constructed in the public sphere, including ‘what is public history?’; the role and nature of choices about how to represent and catalogue the past; differences between museums, archives and heritage sites; audiences and publics; presentation of the past.

Seminars also include input from Goldsmiths Careers and involve trips to important museums, walks, and archives in London.

Lectures and seminars in term 1 will take the form of a two-hour block. They will be held either at Goldsmiths or involve a trip to a museum or archive where students will experience different aspects of public history in practice and have the opportunity to learn from curators and archivists.

Term 1 Lecture/seminar schedule:
1. Introduction
2. Black History Month walk
3. CV workshop (careers)
4. Jewish Museum visit
5. Public history lecture/seminar 1
6. LMA visit
7. Public history lecture/seminar 2
8. Queer history visit (V&A/Bishopsgate?)
9. Preparing for your placement workshop (careers)
10. Public History conclusion

Public history is active, reactive and connected to the present. It is an essential part of a historian’s toolkit; it means putting historical research and writings into dialogue with public understandings of the past to have the broadest possible impact. It also means learning about the past and shaping research agendas by engaging with communities and the public. It can be developed on a grass-roots level beyond the university, or it can mean taking academic research and making it accessible to the public.

Black British histories were developed, formed and shaped by activists, communities, and local archives before this field emerged as an academic discipline in universities. This module:  1) explored the community and activist roots of Black British history, and the ways organisations like the Black Cultural Archives, Institute of Race Relations and George Padmore Institute have preserved Black British pasts and histories of race in Britain; 2) examines the ways that Black British histories are created, developed and shared in the present. This includes: heritage projects, media, TV and film, digital resources, public commemoration, and the use of history to create public policy; 3) explores the historical roots of present-day actions taken to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ and the university, the ways Black British histories and histories of race have been made invisible in education and public memory, and what it means to create new systems of knowledge production and exchange.

The rise and popularity of public history has become so widespread that some scholars have called it a ‘public history turn’. This interdisciplinary and interactive module not only introduces students to the methods and ideas behind public history, it will also help students learn how to make Black British histories more accessible and build transferable skills in public engagement and communication. The module includes field trips, guest lectures and a walking tour. This module is suitable for all students; prior knowledge or experience in Black British history not required.

This 15 credit course will consist of a 60-hour placement, normally one 6-hr day a week for 10 weeks, in a partner institution from the museums, archives or heritage sector.

This module is the culmination of the BA History with Public History pathway and is designed to showcase and synthesise the knowledge, understanding, practical skills, and experience acquired throughout the pathway in the previous three years.

In a co-requisite history special subject module, students undertake independent historical research on a particular topic of their choice related to that module. That research then forms the basis for this module and a piece of real-world public history practice in a history or heritage context. This might be an exhibition, a performance, an installation, an audio or video podcast, a walking tour, a film or another form of public interaction derived from the historical research. Opportunities for these projects include established Goldsmiths-based spaces and events, annual events staged in the local community around Goldsmiths (i.e. Telegraph Hill Festival, Lewisham People’s Day, Hilly Fields Midsummer Fayre) and partnerships with London-based history and heritage organisations established and maintained through the History in Practice module. Digital and online activities would also be options in the event of in-person activities not being possible at that time.

The autumn term consists of a series of workshops designed to refresh existing knowledge and understanding of public history concepts and practices and introduce the processes of scoping, designing and delivering a specific public history project. Alongside these workshops in the autumn term, there will be a parallel series of seminars in which students will discuss and draw up proposals for their own individual projects. These seminars will also provide opportunities for students to present their project to tutors and peers and receive feedback. The project proposal is further refined in the second half of the autumn term to produce a detailed and agreed project plan that outlines the content and methodology of the project, including the aims and key sources of the historical research, the approach and angle of the public history work, and addresses issues of location, management, implementation and audience. The deadline for this proposal is the end of the autumn term and it forms part of the overall project assessment.

In the spring term, students work on their individual projects under close supervision from staff. Students in this module will be individually supervised for their public history project by the module tutor. This supervision will work in tandem with the subject supervision they will receive from the special subject module tutor and at least one supervision meeting in each term should include both supervisors. Each student will be provided with a small budget (c. £75) which they will be expected to manage and account for. The final project itself will take place in either the spring or summer term depending upon the particular circumstances of the project. The first marker will assess the project in person and, where necessary, recordings will be made to facilitate second-marking and external examination. Following the project activity, students write a project report in which they reflect upon the activity and critically assess it.