Year 1 History options

This module introduces you to the importance of intellectual and cultural history as a way of understanding yourself and the world around you.

The course consists of ten topics, all focusing on the relationship between human beings and their surroundings. The first part deals with Humans and the natural world (the human body, madness and melancholy, animals and birds, the rural and urban environments); the second with Political systems in theory and practice (monarchies, republics, democracies, utopias and dystopias).

You'll engage with a wide variety of primary source material, including images, philosophical and literary texts, letters and works of self-reflection.

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 you with 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 course introduces you to key themes, sources and approaches utilised in the history of medicine.

Topics include:

• The history of pandemics and their treatment
• Changing ideas of illness and the body
• Disease and social history
• A reflection on Covid-19

This module will emphasise global connections in the histories of disease and illness, and a range of analytic frameworks and primary source materials will be introduced to explore these links across time and region. Weeks 1-3 will explore the history of pandemics, followed by a visit to the Wellcome Collection. Weeks 5-8 will examine themes such as the history of public health, vaccination and disease and society. In weeks 9-10 we will reflect on Covid-19 within the historical landscape of pandemics.

This module explores the hatred of Jews from the late nineteenth century (the advent of ‘racial anti-Semitism’) until the eve of the Second World War. You'll learn the roots of ideological anti-Semitism, and its many iterations and motives – religious, economic, racial etc. It helps you 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. The programme will primarily be taught through a one-hour lecture and one-hour seminar format. However, there will also be two special 2-hour seminar sessions to enable students to focus on key anti-Semitic texts and actions and to offer more in-depth training in analysing primary sources. Gobbets and timed examinations evaluate the skills in (i) analysis of primary sources and historiography and (ii) argumentation that the module teaches.

The weekly topics will be:

• What was (is) anti-Semitism?
• Jewish lives in late nineteenth-century East-Central Europe
• The Imperial Russian pogroms, 1881-4 and 1903-64
• The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
• The first ethnic cleansings: anti-Semitism in the First World War
• Bolshevik Revolution and the radicalisation of anti-Semitism, 1917-23
• Comparative anti-Semitism in interwar East-Central Europe
• Adolf Hitler, the ‘Old Fighters’ and Nazi anti-Semitic ideology and propaganda
• Social Death: Jewish lives in 1930s Germany
• The Night of Broken Glass, 9-10 November 1938

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.

The weekly topics will be:

• Geographies and Histories: Belfast, Dublin and Cork prior to 1912 (including close attention to data in the 1911 Census and maps).
• Historiographies: analysis of key historical work.
• Using Primary Sources: a training session on the key sources available.
• Politics: Home Rule and Labour.
• First World War: Enlistment in British Forces 1914.
• First World War: Key Battles of the First World War for local units.
• The Easter Rising.
• The War of Independence.
• The Civil War. 10.The Decade of Centenaries.

This module explores the relationship between disasters, culture, politics, and society and provides the tools to think about this relationship historically. It will consider the historical trajectories, political decisions, and cultural forces that have left some nations and regions more susceptible to disaster than others, and it will also consider the ways that societies over time have responded in the aftermath of catastrophe. It will focus especially on the role that colonialism and racism have played in manufacturing vulnerabilities.

The module will also serve as an introduction to environmental history and ways of historicizing the intersections between the natural world/natural hazards and human society. The module will be taught in 10 2-hour seminars/workshops, which will feature discussions of disasters from different time periods and regional contexts. Seminars will incorporate primary source analysis as well as classic and newer scholarship in the field of disaster studies. The emphasis overall will be on developing methods and approaches to thinking critically about and researching disasters as historical phenomena.

In the years 1939-45, most of continental Europe was occupied by Nazi Germany. This module lets you explore this defining wartime experience, drawing attention to its national, transnational and regional contexts.

We'll cover eastern, south-eastern and western Europe, highlighting the commonalities in Nazi occupation practices across Europe, as well as significant differences. You'll learn about the hardships and moral quandaries faced by occupied populations, examining passivity, collaboration and resistance. The module explores how geography, institutional context, timing, external British or Soviet aid, and the Nazis’ racial hierarchy and consequent brutality all influenced resistance.

We'll examine the differing characters and politics of national resistance movements (from armed forces to evasion lines, the concealment of Jews and passive resistance), and the extent to which resistance can be considered as transnational (for example, through the influence of Spanish Republicans). Lastly, the post-war memory and myth-making of resistance are explained, drawing out their political significance for Europe’s post-war stability and new political order. The module will be taught through a weekly one-hour lecture and one-hour seminar format (10 sessions).

Topics will include:

• Overview Lecture: Occupation and Resistance in Europe, 1939-45
• Eastern Europe: Nazi Racial Plans and Resource Exploitation in Occupied Eastern Europe (Poland / USSR)
• Eastern Europe: Soviet Partisan Warfare
• Eastern Europe: The Warsaw Uprisings, 1943 and 1944
• The Balkans: Yugoslavia under Fascism - Ustasha Racial Policies in Croatia / German Reprisals in Serbia
• The Balkans: Resistance and Civil War in Occupied Yugoslavia
• The Balkans: Resistance and Civil War in Greece, 1941-49
• Western Europe: Collaboration and Resistance in France
• Western Europe: Collaboration and Resistance in the Low Countries
• Occupation and Resistance in Memory and Popular Culture since 1945

This module provides you with an introduction to People’s History. It allows you to explore how and why investigating the otherwise ‘ordinary’ and everyday lives of individuals gives 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.

You'll 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.

You'll also engage with a range of other materials including census returns, BMD records, coroner’s inquests and employment records. You'll create your own research project derived from your own investigations of primary-source material. These projects will be supported through interactive seminars, supervision and workshops.

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 you may already know.

You'll learn about 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 police evidence, wills and probate records, oral histories, family photographs and inherited records, newspaper accounts, prison records and much more besides.