History BA(Hons)

This module looks at the political and social histories of a number of case studies focusing on the period from the end of the 19th Century to the eve of the Second World War. We cover countries from a range of European and World powers, including the USSR, the USA and France. In each case you’ll analyse the main political concerns of the day, such as immigration, democracy, fascism and communism, considering them in wider social contexts.

Critical thinking enables us to go beyond the surface of information, using analytical skills to dissect, question, and evaluate ideas with a detective's curiosity and a scientist's precision. The module will hone your intellectual skills in reasoning and close analysis, improve your ability to present arguments effectively, and equip you to plan and conduct an independent research project. This module will also provide support for planning your personal and career development.

You'll gain a practical understanding of how non-textual sources can be used to write history. You'll be encouraged to explore at least three different types of source material and look at the variety of ways the past is represented in the historical record and the contemporary world. This may involve organising an oral history project or handling the objects in a museum collection.

This module explores the Crusades to the Holy Land from the late 11th to mid-13th Centuries in the context of contemporary political, social and religious developments in Western Europe and the Middle East. You'll be directed to different accounts of the Crusades in contemporary sources from the perspective of the crusaders themselves, as well as from the point of view of the Jewish, Islamic and Byzantine peoples who were affected by the influx of Western Europeans to the Eastern Mediterranean. You'll also have the opportunity to examine crusading activities within Europe (e.g. Spain and the Baltic).

On this module, you'll use archival resources to explore the social, cultural, legal and emotional history of refugees in the twentieth century. You'll think about how we can hear the refugee ‘voice’ in history and how this can help us reflect on the experience of displacement, in the contemporary world as well as in the past.

Through a study of primary and secondary sources, this module introduces you to the political and religious history of the Tudor and Early Stuart periods in areas under the control of the English Crown. You'll find out that many issues from this time have been debated by historians, and come to understand how they resonate into the 21st Century.

This module deals with the theory and practice of oral history in relation to the history of childhood and youth. You'll conduct at least one interview, and provide all the relevant ethical and archival documentation to accompany it. You'll be introduced to the key problems in oral history of memory, ethics, intersubjectivity and narrative. Finally, in order to write about the experience of childhood and youth in the past, you'll learn the analytical techniques which can be applied to oral history data.

On this module you'll get to grips with the history, memory and historiographical controversy surrounding the Nazi era in European History. You'll use a broad range of primary and secondary source material to develop a deep historical analysis, rooted in the debates over the consent or coercion of the German population, the limits of the totalitarian model and the nature of victimhood and commemoration.

You’ll be exploring histories of the African continent on this module, and thinking analytically about sources in order to break free from dominant colonial ideas, structures and questions. Following broadly chronological lines, you’ll consider the impacts of geography, religions, slavery, medicine and healthcare, among other key themes.

The Honours Project is a 6,000-word tightly focused project based on primary sources. You can choose this instead of the longer dissertation, and pick up another module to make up the credits. The Project is on a topic of your choice. You’ll also produce and present a research poster outlining your progress.

This module will investigate East Central Europe in the period between the two World Wars. Carving states out of the remnants of the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian Empires created much political (and, in some cases, military) turmoil over border disputes and ethnic exclaves, some of which resurfaced after the end of the Cold War. You will learn about Eastern European history in the 1920s and 1930s, theory and methods of spatial history and historical geography, maps as sources, and digital cartography for analysis and dissemination of historical geographies.

This module aims to develop your understanding of the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries in relation to the ‘care’ of what we would now call mentally ill and learning disabled people. By focusing on social and political, as well as medical themes, you’ll have the chance to explore both the understanding of mental ill health and learning disability, and the responses to them.

This module examines the impact of economic conditions in the era of the Great Depression on British politics, culture and society. You’ll be looking at government economic policy, the social impact of economic changes on education and other social issues, examining the consequences of unemployment, the problems of poverty and health, and the protest movements of the National Unemployed Workers' Movement, and the General Strike. You’ll also explore the fortunes of the Conservative, Liberal and Labour parties during the inter-war years and assess the activities of smaller parties such as the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the British Union of Fascists (BUF) and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).

This module will explore aspects of medieval history in depth, focusing on contemporary narrative sources, both historical and literary, and including some consideration of related visual and material sources. You'll also engage with the post-medieval representation of the Middle Ages in both academic and popular terms.

This module examines the history and memory of the French experience of World War II, focusing on the German Occupation, the Vichy Regime, French collaboration, and the development of internal and external resistance. You'll have access to a broad range of primary and secondary source material (in translation) to provide a cultural historical analysis, rooted in the debates over silence, truth and representation.We’ll watch a number of historical feature films together and use them to analyse how public or popular memory develops.

The module immerses you in the aftermath of the First World War and attempts at peacebuilding and reconstruction. You’ll investigate the work of new organisations like the League of Nations, the experiences of individuals and cultural responses. There’s a focus on Britain, but set in the context of international movements and global challenges.

The reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) is at the heart of this module. By examining a range of primary sources from the era, as well as important secondary studies, you’ll gain real understanding of key themes in the early-modern era, such as gender, politics, foreign policy and religion. You’ll also consider how Elizabeth has been portrayed in the modern era, in images, television and film.

This module develops your understanding of the Great War: its origins, the military course of the conflict, its impact on British society, and reactions to the war in literature, art and memorial architecture. While we’ll mainly study the British experience of the First World War, we’ll also broaden our approach and consider continental European and imperial experiences too.