History Modules

Special Subjects 

Some degree programmes allow you to choose a History Special Subject/Group 3 module; please see the individual degree descriptions for details.

You have access to the resources of all of the colleges of the University of London when you select a Special Subject from approximately 40 available across the University. These span a range of subjects, allowing you to access the expertise of the largest concentration of university history teachers in the country.

The Special Subjects are based on the use of original sources in detailed study, which further develops your skills of understanding and interpreting historical evidence. They are worth 60 credits and count for half of the third year’s work. The availability of modules offered may vary from year to year.

Goldsmiths

'The Department of History offers the following Special Subjects, which include a 30 credit module and a 30 credit dissertation (60 credits total). Special subjects which may be taken without a dissertation are listed in the 30 credit modules above.

Healing, Magic and Mindfulness on the Silk Roads
While history of medicine is usually taught focusing primarily on either ‘western’ or ‘eastern’ traditions, this module will focus on transmissions of knowledge along the Silk Roads. More than just routes on which missionaries, travellers and merchants moved between east and west Asia, the Silk Roads has become a metaphor of east-west connections. This module will deal with Asian medical traditions as they are represented in manuscripts found in sites along the Silk-Roads, primarily the Dunhuang caves and Turfan. The discussion of these medical traditions will be contextualised within the multicultural aspects of the Silk-Roads and within processes of transmission of knowledge along the Silk Roads. The module will also deal with the historical background leading to the discovery of the Silk Road sites and with how the internet is transforming research of the Silk Road. The primary sources used in this module will mostly consist of manuscripts found in Dunhuang (in translation from Chinese, Tibetan, Khotanese and Uighur) as well as visual material and artefacts from the Silk Roads. The texts and artefacts mostly date from the later centuries of the first millennium. The module will include a visit to the British Library to see some of the Dunhuang manuscripts and meet with some of the International Dunhuang Project staff. It will also include a visit to the British Museum to see some of the artefacts and artwork from Dunhuang.

Mughals, Munshis and Mistresses: Society and Rule in Early Colonial India
The module explores the transition from Mughal rule to British colonial rule in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries focussing on social and cultural history related to the ‘Company Raj’. It examines the interface between ‘Indian’ and ‘European’ forms of rule, and what each meant at this time. We discuss Indian rulers, intermediaries and collaborators in the context of how each shaped early colonial rule in areas of law, education and revenue. We then turn our attention to a series of contemporary social debates on the family, sati, education, widow remarriage and social ‘vices’, in order to gain a fuller understanding of this dynamic period in Indian history.

Ireland's First World War
Ireland’s engagement with the First World War was profoundly connected with the politics of the day and the development of the Irish Revolution. The memory of the conflict remains live in today’s politics, with the war playing a central role in unionist identity formation and expression, and nationalist attitudes continuing to change. Meanwhile, the history of Ireland’s First World War is intimately connected to the wider context of the United Kingdom’s war and the way that is remembered through the influence of popular culture. This module is focused on the day-to-day experiences of Irish soldiers in the British army. It also considers connections between the war and wider Irish politics, including the Easter Rising. Battalion war diaries are the core sources, recording the detailed movements of battalions once they had finished training. They provide both much detail and often, vivid description with the main focus being on eleven Irish battalions (1st, 2nd, 6th, 7th, 8th & 9th Royal Dublin Fusiliers, 1st, 2nd and 9th Royal Irish Rifles, 6th Connaught Rangers, and 7th Leinsters) which are central to the module convenor’s books Belfast Boys and Dublin’s Great Wars. A wide range of other sources is used including historical artefacts, poetry, and individual letters/diaries. An optional visit to the National Archive at Kew is arranged to support research, while there is strong academic support and encouragement for research in other archives. An optional residential visit to key Western Front sites takes place at the end of the term following the module. Students make a contribution to the cost of that visit, with the rate published alongside the publication of options each year.

Radicalism during the English Revolution, 1641-1660
This module examines arguably the most turbulent period in all English history: 1641–1660. These years were marked by rebellion in Ireland; bloody Civil Wars in Britain; political, religious and social radicalism; regicide; eleven years of Republican rule; and the de facto restoration of the monarchy. One would think that by now there is nothing new for historians to learn about the English Revolution, that all the important issues have been resolved. Yet the opposite is true, for there remains a lack of consensus as to the causes of events, the manner in which some of them occurred and their significance. Even the name is in dispute. Moreover, whereas class and ideological conflict once seemed a plausible explanatory tool, it has been a major achievement of the so-called revisionist interpretation of early modern England to shift the emphasis away from tension towards consensus and contingency.

One outcome of this approach has been the attempted marginalisation of radicalism during the English Revolution. Thus prominent figures within what might be termed the canonical English radical tradition (itself largely a twentieth-century historical construction) have been regarded as unrepresentative of the conforming, traditionalist, uncommitted majority; their extreme opinions apparently advocated for only a brief period of their lives; their influence upon society supposedly exaggerated both by panicked political elites and skilled propagandists preying on fears of property damage or cautioning against introducing religious toleration and its corollary, moral dissolution (abhorrent beliefs begat aberrant behaviour).

Similarly, conventional forms of popular protest such as food, enclosure and tax riots were reduced in scale and scope and drained of radical ideological content. Instead, these incidents were presented as sporadic, uncoordinated, locally specific, largely bloodless and sometimes richly symbolic examples of conservative disorder. Whatever your opinion, you will get ample opportunity to formulate your arguments, thus adding your own distinctive contribution to these on-going debates.

Sex and the African City
This module explores how the African city was both understood and experienced by its inhabitants. Throughout southern Africa, the 20th century was a time of rapid urbanisation and profound social and political change.

Within this historical context, we examine how African women and men differently negotiated the transition to urban life. Key themes include:

• gender relations and family structures
• sexuality
• race and ethnicity
• religion and ritual
• informal economies and livelihood strategies
• health and development
• urban politics and resistance

We consider the formation of new urban identities and we explore, through in-depth analysis of primary source material, how language and narrative gave voice to these changing identities. The chronological range of the course begins with the mineral discoveries of the late 19th century and extends to present-day debates around homosexuality, sexual violence and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The geographical focus is mainly South Africa, but historical and cultural material from present-day Zambia, Lesotho, Botswana and Zimbabwe are also incorporated.

Birkbeck

• The Age of Plague: Disease, Medicine and Society in Western Europe, 1348–1665
• Later Medieval London, 1450–1560: Community, Politics and Religion
• France, 1774–1794: Reform and Revolution
• Family, Society and Culture in Britain 1832–1918
• Popular Culture in American History, 1870 to the Present
• Literature, Culture and Society in Britain, 1914–1945

King’s College London

• Alexander the Great
• Augustus: Power and Propaganda
• The Norman Conquest of Britain
• The Origins of Reformation in England
• Women and Gender in Early Modern England
• Caribbean Intellectual History, c1800 to the Present
• British Imperial Policy and Decolonisation, 1938-64

Queen Mary

• Religion and Gender in Europe, 1450–1550
• Victorian Intellectual History
• The French Civil War

Royal Holloway

• Heresy, Crusade and Inquisition in Southern France, c1140–1300
• When Kings were Gods: Early Modern Islamic Political Ideas
• Migration, Identity and Citizenship in Modern Britain
• Berlin: A European Metropolis from Kaiser to Kohl
• The History and Historiography of the Holocaust Politics and Society in Palestine from c1900 to 1948
• School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London
• Ivan the Terrible and the Russian Monarchy in the Sixteenth Century
• East and West through Travel Writing: The Limits of Division in Eastern Europe Monarchs and the Enlightenment in Russia and Central Europe
• Urban, Culture and Modernity: Vienna-Prague-Budapest 1857-1938
• Mass Culture in the Age of Revolution: Russia 1900-1932

University College London

• The Assyrian Empire
• Religions, Law and the Papacy in the West: from the Christian Roman Empire to the Frankish 'Roman' Empire
• Voyages and the Imagination in the Middle Ages
• Great Britain and the American Colonies, 1760-1776
• Living the Empire: Metropole and Colony in the 1830s Modernity and Modernism