Year 1 History options

This module explores hatred of Jews from the late nineteenth century (the advent of ‘racial anti-Semitism’) until the eve of the Second World War.  It explains to students the roots of ideological anti-Semitism, and its many iterations and motives – religious, economic, racial etc.  It helps students to track the mutation and radicalization of the ideology in East-Central Europe – the region where most of the world’s Jews lived in 1900 – through the turbulent modernization and conflict of the decades around the turn of the twentieth century.  Particular attention is given to imperial Russia, its western borderlands and pogroms, the First World War and its revolutionary aftermath, and Nazi Germany up to 1939.  Students are taught to use comparative historical methodology and presented with broad overviews of Jews’ varying life experiences and anti-Semitism across East-Central Europe to evaluate these subjects.

This module examines the role of art in the cultural construction and exercise of political power in the early modern Mediterranean. It aims to provide an understanding of the ways in which art and architecture shaped notions of secular and sacred power, provided justifications for the legitimisation of authority, and functioned as instruments of government across a range of political regimes, ranging from republics to empires. The module will investigate performances of statecraft and the culture of early modern politics through a variety of case-studies, from the Republic of Venice to the Spanish Empire, the courts of Ferrara and Mantua, the Ottoman Empire, and Louis XIV's Versailles. Central to the module is the consideration of artworks and different forms of visual and material expression as primary sources in historical practice.

This module offers a comparative perspective on the experiences of the three largest Irish cities and their surrounding areas during the era of the First World War and the Irish Revolution.  The module will examine differences and similarities between the three areas as they negotiated labour disputes, the Home Rule Crisis, involvement in the First World War, the Easter Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil war.  It will also consider the historical legacy of these conflicts by considering the place played by each during the Decade of Centenaries (2012-23).  Throughout, it will focus on work on primary sources, leading up to an essay based on linking such sources to historiography.

This module focusses on the history of the ‘Crusades’ in the Medieval Middle East. The module will rely on a wide range of primary and secondary sources across interdisciplinary boundaries in order to explore how the concept of ‘Holy War’ was created, understood and implemented by Christian and Muslim institutions and people in the medieval Middle East. It will cover methodological questions such as the idea of ‘Holy War’, the establishment of Christian kingdoms and principalities in the Middle East and the reaction of Islamic states to the Christian offensive. The module will question traditional understandings of the Crusade period by revisiting the different ways in which Crusades were carried out through time and by analyzing original sources that will help to re-think the nature of these conflictive times. The historical context of ‘the Crusades’ will also be used as a way to introduce students to the cultural and religious diversity of medieval Middle East by looking not only at sectarian rivalries but also at spaces of Convivencia characteristic of this period.

This course introduces students to key themes, sources and approaches utilized in the history of medicine. Topics include the history of disease, the history of therapeutics, healers and health institutions, and changing ideas of illness and the body. This module will emphasize global connections in the histories of health and healing, and a range of analytic frameworks and primary source materials will be introduced to explore these linkages across time and region.   Weeks 1-5 will examine how the study of medical history has changed over time, including social and cultural approaches, colonial and imperial perspectives, and medical humanities.  Weeks 6-10 will consider, for example, a life cycle approach or pandemics.

This module examines Ireland’s relationship with world history from its emergence from the British Empire after its independence struggle to its membership of the EU single market in 1992. It places developments in Ireland in the context of global currents such as the Great Depression, fascism, the Second World War and the Cold War and explores how a small both resisted and was shaped by forces beyond its control. The module will look at how Ireland carved out a new identity in its relationship with Britain, negotiated neutrality during the Second World War and then opened up its economy after years of stagnation, eventually joining the EEC, by which time the troubles in Northern Ireland were themselves profoundly affected by international developments.

This module provides students with an introduction to People’s History and allows them to explore how and why investigating the otherwise ‘ordinary’ and everyday lives of individuals provides valuable and fascinating information and evidence for understanding the past. London, from c. 1650 onwards, with its rich and vibrant people’s history, provides the location, and a plethora of digital primary-source archives provide the raw materials that students engage with.

Students will learn how to access and interrogate the wealth of information contained in digital archives including, the Convict Transportation Registers Database, the Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, the London Lives database, the Digital Panopticon database, Legacies of British Slave Ownership database, Historic Hospital Admission Records database, The London Hearth Tax database, and more. They will also engage with a range of other materials including census returns, BMD records, coroner’s inquests and employment records.

Students will create their own research project derived from their own investigations of primary-source material. These projects will be supported through interactive seminars, supervision and workshops.

This optional module (compulsory for EH and HJ students) examines key British publications – both fictional and journalistic – that impacted on the dominant ideologies concerning social and private lives in the century after the print explosion of the mid-19^th century. Continuity and change in attitudes and values are analysed through both literature and journalistic reporting. The module consists of lectures that explain the historical context, and seminars where students focus on works of fiction alongside selected pieces of journalism to enable them to be able to assess to what extent these words impacted on people’s beliefs, attitudes and lived experience. The aim is to understand how print both reflects the dominant ideologies and challenges them. Students are required to do close readings in preparation for these discussions. The module enables them to gain an understanding of everyday life in this dynamic century while gaining the necessary skills to analyse primary sources and apply them to their understanding.

The module is based around publications that concern broad themes. These change according to staff expertise; examples could include: gender roles in family life, female sexuality and the sexual double standard, divorce, insanity, employment and unemployment, race and imperialism, and support for/opposition to war. Each theme is studied for one or two weeks (as appropriate) to enable a consideration of texts that reflected and reinforced dominant ideologies, and others that challenged them.

This module takes as its focus a deep investigation into one person’s life, experiences and networks based on the close reading of pre-selected primary sources and support from contextualising lectures on British and London queer histories in the twentieth century. This kind of microhistory personalises queer history by getting to ‘know’ one person across their life path, or in a period of significance during their lifetime. Because the documents we will interrogate describe the life of someone living in London, this strategy will also build on familiar spaces, places and landscapes known to many students already. The module will also introduce students to the craft of doing historical research, marshalling different kinds of evidence, and building stories based on potentially conflicting accounts and records. Sources may include personal letters, trial depositions and policie evidence, wills and probate records, oral histories, family photographs and inherited records, newspaper accounts, prison records and much more besides.

What were the key ideas of the ‘Enlightenment’, and how did they transform politics and society in modern Europe? This course provides an introductory survey to some of the major thinkers, writers, rebels and campaigners associated with an age of revolutions spanning the 17^th and 18^th centuries. It explores how changing ideas of freedom, nature, reason, progress, God, sex, democracy and racial equality spilled out from the circles, salons, coffee-shops and correspondence of intellectuals and into the streets and slave plantations of Europe, the Caribbean and America.

Throughout, the course is concerned with critically reflecting on what we mean by ‘Enlightenment’, and its deeply Eurocentric connotations. While we will provide a rigorous foundation in traditional key Enlightenment political thought (e.g. Spinoza, Locke and Rousseau), this course also emphasises and focuses on the underappreciated role of women and freed slaves to this radical tradition. We will explore pioneering works of early feminism by Mary Astell. We follow the Women’s March on Versailles and explore how Olympe de Gouges radically repurposed the “Rights of Man” for women (and was executed for it). We will debate Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas on gender and power. We also look at how early proponents of democracy imagined the Americas, like the planned experimental colony of Franciscus van den Enden (a would-be regicide, and tutor of Spinoza), wherein slavery was abolished. In addition, we explore how campaign groups led by freed slaves like the Sons of Africa (thought to be Britain’s first black political organisation) pioneered the slavery abolitionist movement. We will conclude with the Haitian Revolution led by Toussaint Louverture, whose successful slave rebellion used Enlightenment ideas of nature and equality to delegitimise and defeat three European empires.

The course ultimately provides two students with two things: a rigorous training in Enlightenment political thought, and a sharpened critical awareness of how history and historiography can be open to multiple forms of interpretation – from a ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ Enlightenment to one attuned to colonialism, class, race, sexuality and gender. This course would be particularly suitable for BA History and Politics students.

This module will focus on the interdisciplinary hermeneutic practice and meta-interpretation (“uses and abuses” of the past) of the history of the Balkans and its entanglements in a global historical interface. Aiming at empowering the students with an important “hands-on” experience of source analysis, the module will cover 5 major interpretation stances/source types featuring the region’s primary evidence from the Middle Ages until the present day.

Topic 1: Structures of power, as reflected by documentary sources (e.g. medieval charters; early-modern tax registers; official diplomatic and state communication);

Topic 2: Identities and their construction, as recorded by written narrative sources (e.g. histories, genealogies, personal memoirs);

Topic 3: Identities and their reception, as reflected by visual sources (e.g. fresco-paintings, modern works of art; photograph);

Topic 4: Materialia, the politics of identity and policies of commemoration (e.g. organization of the region’s historic and commemorative space, objects inferring nostalgia about the past, or the current debate on bio-archeological data);

Topic 5: Modern uses and abuses of the past (e.g. film language, media content analysis, oral histories).