History Module Descriptions 2019/20 Level H
History
Module Descriptions 2019/20
Level H (i.e. 3rd Yr.) Modules
Please be aware that all modules are subject to availability.
If you have any questions about the modules listed in this handbook, please contact [email protected].
For many of these modules, some experience of studying History may be required, and you should remember this when choosing your modules. If there is another module that you need to have studied before taking this, it will be stated in the module description.
Please note that at the time this document has been prepared the following information is provisional, and there may be minor changes between now and the beginning of 2019/20 academic year.
History Autumn Advanced Options are usually assessed by 2 x 2500 word essays (50% each) and History Spring Advanced Options are usually assessed by a 3-hour exam. Please note that places are limited and although we will try our best to accommodate as many first preferences as possible, this may not be possible in all cases.
MODULE TITLE Experts, Scholars, and Spies: the Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe MODULE CODE 32032 CREDIT VALUE 20 ASSESSMENT METHOD 3 hour exam in Summer term TEACHING METHOD TBC SEMESTER 2
DESCRIPTION
Early modern Europe was transformed by information. Using new devices, natural philosophers explored the sky, the human body, and the earth itself; travellers and missionaries studied remote cultures; and publishers used the new technology of print to produce scholarly monographs, lying pamphlets, partisan newspapers. This unit introduces students to the emerging field of information history. We ask: how was knowledge produced and circulated? How did early moderns understand what they read? What was the relationship between power, social status, and the production of knowledge? Students will develop research techniques and gain experience in dealing with a variety of early modern sources – business records, reading notes, newspapers – that are fundamental for understanding what early modern people knew and how they saw the world. Important themes include the print revolution, literacy and reading, the circulation of scientific and political information, popular print and newspapers, and the emergence of a Republic of Letters.
Seminar topics may include:
The rise of 'method', secrecy, espionage and news, collecting and museums, experimental science, the 'print revolution'
Key texts:
S. Shapin, Social History of Truth (1994)
P. Findlen, Possessing Nature (1994)
B. Dooley, Social History of Skepticism (1999)
J. Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (2013).
For further information:
Please contact the module convenor, Dr Noah Millstone: [email protected]
MODULE TITLE Piracy, Peoples and Exploitation MODULE CODE 32004 CREDIT VALUE 20 ASSESSMENT METHOD 3 hour exam in Summer term TEACHING METHOD TBC SEMESTER 2
DESCRIPTION
In 1497 only five years after Christopher Columbus reached the New World, Henry VII sponsored John Cabot on a voyage of exploration which led to Newfoundland being claimed for England. The rewards of fish and rocks, rather than gold and plantations helped to dampen the English enthusiasm for investing in overseas exploration yet despite the early lack of interest, by the end of the Tudor period, the English had become important players in the European search for overseas wealth, territory and peoples, founding their first colonies in the Americas, and establishing vast global trading companies. This course will look at English exploration over the whole Tudor period, examining the early efforts at westward expansion and culminating with the proto-colonies developed in the New World. It will examine why the English were so slow to participate in voyages of exploration and expansion and discuss how after nearly a century of negligible or non-existent participation in voyages of expansion, England became an active participant to the extent that the origins of the British Empire could be said to be traceable to this era.
Seminar topics may include:
John Cabot and the discovery of Newfoundland; Thomas More’s Utopia and English exploration; Books to build an empire (reading before exploring); Privateering and Piracy and their impact on exploration; the search for landroutes to Asia; the search for the Northwest Passage and the sea route round Canada; failed colonies (Meta Incognita, Roanoke); the Circumnavigators (Drake and Cavendish); Sir Walter Raleigh and the Americas, the establishing of the Muscovy, Levant and East India Companies
Key texts:
Kenneth Raymond Andrews; Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630 (Cambridge University Press, 1984) Nicholas Canney (ed.); The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume I: The Origins of Empire: Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century Vol 1 (Oxford University Press, 2001) Peter Mancall; Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan Obsession for an English Empire (Yale University Press, 2007) David B. Quinn; England and the discovery of America, 1481-1620 : from the Bristol voyages of the fifteenth century to the Pilgrim settlement at Plymouth: the exploration, exploitation, and trial-and- error colonization of North America by the English (Allen and Unwin, 1973) Clendinnen, Inga, Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1991) Coe, Michael, The Maya (Thames and Hudson, 1966, eighth edition 2011) Conrad, Geoffrey, and Demarest, Arthur, Religion and Empire; The Dynamics of Aztec and Inca expansionism (Cambridge University Press, 1984) D'Altroy, Terence, The Incas (Blackwell, 2002) Davies, Nigel, The Aztecs (MacMillan, 1973) Fuentes, Carlos, The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World (Houghton Mifflin, 1993) Hemming, John, The Conquest of the Incas (MacMillan, 1971) Kamen, Henry, Empire; How Spain Became a World Power 1492-1763 (Penguin, 2002) Miller, Mary Ellen, The Art of Mesoamerica: from Olmec to Aztec (Thames and Hudson, 1986, fifth edition 2012) Smith, Michael, The Aztecs (Oxford, 2003) Thomas, Hugh, The Conquest of Mexico (Pilmico, 1994) Thomas, Hugh, Rivers of Gold; The Rise of the Spanish Empire (Phoenix, 2003)
For further information:
Please contact the module convenor, Dr Marga Small: [email protected]
MODULE TITLE Body Politics MODULE CODE 32002 CREDIT VALUE 20 ASSESSMENT METHOD 3 hour exam in Summer term TEACHING METHOD TBC SEMESTER 2
Please note that this module has extremely limited availability, we would only recommend selecting this module if it is compulsory for your studies.
DESCRIPTION
The module explores the struggles to control, pathologise, and normalize human bodies, with a particular focus on science, medicine, and the state, both in North America and in a broader global health context. Topics include disease, race and politics; repression and regulation of birth control; the politics of adoption; domestic and global population control; feminist health movements; and the pathologising and identity politics of disabled people.
Key texts:
Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty First Century (Princeton, 2006).
M Fraser and M Greco M (eds), The Body. A Reader (London, 2005)
Pitts, In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification (New York, 2006)
Weitz R. (ed.), The Politics of Women's Bodies (New York, 2010)
For more information:
Please contact the module convenor, Dr Michell Chresfield: [email protected]
MODULE TITLE Visions of Utopia: Socialism, 1800-1980 MODULE CODE 31015 CREDIT VALUE 20 ASSESSMENT METHOD 3 hour exam in Summer term TEACHING METHOD TBC SEMESTER 2
DESCRIPTION
Since its origins, socialism has not only provided a compelling argument for economic reform and material redistribution; it also offered a powerful set of cultural values and utopian ideas. In the nineteenth century many socialists viewed themselves as ‘converts’ to a new way of life, suggesting that they viewed their movement in terms borrowed from religion. This module will trace the development of socialism in cultural and intellectual historical perspective from the early nineteenth century through the 1970s. We will aim to understand how socialism became so popular, how it drew strength from other currents of thought and cultural movements such as religious revivalism and evolutionism, and how it lost so much of its appeal by the 1980s. Through secondary literature and vivid primary sources, including fiction and film, we will examine how socialists responded to what they considered the central challenges of the day in Europe, North America, and beyond. For instance, early socialists saw themselves restoring ‘true Christianity’ after the crisis of spiritual authority engendered by the French Revolution. The American novelist Edward Bellamy imagined a utopian alternative to the rise of monopoly capitalism and consumer society. And Otto Bauer and Frantz Fanon inspired socialist responses to ethnic nationalism and overseas imperialism, respectively.
Seminar topics may include: French Revolutionary origins; the ‘Utopian Socialists’; 1848 and the Communist Manifesto; social democracy and redemptive Marxism; the American socialist imagination; ‘folk socialism’ and the peasantry; the Bolshevik challenge; anti-colonial socialism
Key texts: Primary sources include: Robert Owen, A New View of Society (1813) Etienne Cabet, Travels in Icaria (1840); Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888); Otto Bauer, The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy (1907); Alexander Dovzhenko, Earth (1930 film); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (New York, 2002) Axel Honneth, The Idea of Socialism, trans. Joseph Ganahl (Cambridge, 2017) Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Religion and the origins of socialism’ in Ira Katnelson and Gareth Stedman Jones, eds., Religion and the Political Imagination (Cambridge, 2010) Edward Timms, Peter Collier, eds., Visions and Blueprints: Avant-Garde culture and radical politics in early twentieth-century Europe (Manchester, 1988). Hugh McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe 1789-1989 (Oxford, 1997) Stephen Yeo, ‘A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883-1896’, History Workshop Journal 4 (1977).
Please contact the current module convenor, Dr Jakub Beneš: [email protected]
MODULE TITLE China in Revolution: China under Mao (1949- 1976) MODULE CODE 31015 CREDIT VALUE 20 ASSESSMENT METHOD 3 hour exam in Summer term TEACHING METHOD TBC SEMESTER 2
Please note that this module has extremely limited availability, we would only recommend selecting this module if it is compulsory for your studies.
DESCRIPTION
The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) is arguably the most important historical event of China’s twentieth century, yet in many ways it is the least understood. It saw the last decade of Mao Zedong’s life rule and had impetus in Mao’s desire to hold on to power over the party-state he helped create, as well as to instill revolutionary spirit in China’s youth. Although the Cultural Revolution saw the destruction of innumerable artifacts of historical culture and memory, it has also been richly documented both on camera in photographs and film, and in writing by way of memoirs. The unique characteristics of the Cultural Revolution will allow our module to explore the meanings of history, and its contestation between the state and ordinary actors, from a variety of backgrounds.
Seminar topics may include: The Cultural Revolution’s historical background, the Communist Party’s rise to power and early years of rule, Soviet influence on the early years of the party, the party-state structure, the role of gender and age in the dynamics of the Cultural Revolution, the relationship between city and countryside, intersections with anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles around the world, and finally, how the Cultural Revolution is remembered and utilized in contemporary China.
Key texts: Jeremy Brown and Matthew Johnson (2015), Maoism at the Grassroots; Frank Dikötter (2015), The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976; Denise Y. Ho (2017), Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China; Emily Honig (2003), ‘Socialist Sex: The Cultural Revolution Revisited’; Xianlin, Ji (1998), The Cowshed: Memories of the Cultural Revolution; Yang Jiang (1988), Six Chapters From My Life “Down Under”; Lorenz Lüthi (2008), ‘The Vietnam War and China’s Third-Line Defense Planning before the Cultural Revolution, 1964-1966’, Journal of Cold War Studies; Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals (2006), Mao’s Last Revolution; Andrew Walder (2015), China under Mao; Hungci Xu (2017), No Wall Too High: One Man’s Daring Escape from Mao’s Darkest Prison; Rae Yang (2013), Spider Eaters: A Memoir Xueping Zhong, ed. (2001), Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era Watch: Gate of Heavenly Peace (1995) Morning Sun (2003)
For further information:
Please contact the module convenor, Dr Shirley Ye: [email protected] MODULE TITLE Gross Indecency to Gay Marriage? Gender and Sexual Minorities 1885 to the Present MODULE CODE 32005 CREDIT VALUE 20 ASSESSMENT METHOD 3 hour exam in Summer term TEACHING METHOD TBC SEMESTER 2
Please note that this module has extremely limited availability, we would only recommend selecting this module if it is compulsory for your studies.
DESCRIPTION
“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it,” wrote Oscar Wilde in 1891. Less than a decade later, the Irish poet and playwright was dead, having never recovered from his prison term for gross indecency with men. This module takes up Wilde’s challenge and explores the queer history of modern Britain. Beginning in 1885, when the Labouchère Amendment made gross indecency a crime, the module traces the emergence of queer identities and practices from sexological debates and criminal codes. It covers the politics of gay activism in the 1970s and 1980s and the development of modern identity categories, often grouped in the acronym LGBTQI+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex), protected by the 2010 Equalities Act. Defining ‘Britain’ broadly, we will ask how empire and colonialism shaped queer historical experience, and we will explore the intersections of race, class, and gender within the worlds of sexual and gender minorities – looking, for example, at the home movies made by a British archaeologist in Palestine in the 1930s and the Bedouin man who seems to be his lover. Queer history challenges us to read between the lines and to unsettle established categories, a project we will undertake with a variety of sources, such as Jeanette Winterson’s classic coming-out tale Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). Ultimately, we will ask how the tools and methods of queer studies can help us to rewrite the history of modern Britain.
Seminar topics may include:
Sexology in the late 19th century; decriminalisation of sex between men (1967); lesbian bar culture of the 1950s-1960s; the gay liberation movement; cross-gender identification and the emergence of ‘trans’ as a category; HIV/AIDS and activism in the 1980s; the Irish gay marriage referendum (2015).
Key texts:
Christine Burns, ed., Trans Britain: Our Journey from the Shadows (London, 2018) Matt Cook, Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London (Basingstoke, 2014) Laura Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War (Chicago, 2013) Rebecca Jennings, Tomboys and Bachelor Girls: A Lesbian History of Post-War Britain 1945- 71 (Manchester, 2007) Brian Lewis, ed., British Queer History: New Approaches and Perspectives (Manchester, 2013) Gemma Romain, Race, Sexuality and Identity in Britain and Jamaica: The Biography of Patrick Nelson, 1916-1963 (London, 2017)
For further information: Please contact the current module convenor, Dr Mo Moulton: [email protected] MODULE TITLE George Orwell, England and the Modern World MODULE CODE 31018 CREDIT VALUE 20 ASSESSMENT METHOD 3 hour exam in Summer term TEACHING METHOD TBC SEMESTER 2
Please note that this module has extremely limited availability, we would only recommend selecting this module if it is compulsory for your studies.
DESCRIPTION
Eric Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, has proved one of the most enduring English authors of the early twentieth century. Few students enter university without having read at least one of his two anti-totalitarian novels, Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1948). The term “Orwellian” has entered common usage as a synonym for dystopic totalitarianism, and in the years since the terror attacks of 9/11 has become a commonplace in discussions of the modern “security state”. Yet, Orwell did not begin his career as an anti-totalitarian polemicist. Born in British India and educated at Eton, Eric Blair first followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the Indian Civil Service as a police officer in Burma, before returning to England to begin a career as a writer. Over the next two decades his essays, novels, literary criticism and reportage took on nearly every major social and political topic of the day, including urban poverty, consumer culture, the future of the British empire, unemployment, the appeal (or lack thereof) of the British communist party, the threat of fascism, the future of social democracy, the meaning of “Englishness”, and role of politics in modern life. During the Second World War, he was employed by the Ministry of Information as a state propagandist. By the end of his career, he was viewed by many as a defender of individual integrity against state tyranny, and condemned by others as an apostate to socialism. This course will take a historical approach to both Orwell and to the myriad subjects to which he turned his pen. We’ll begin and end with an analysis of Orwell’s role as a chronicler and shaper of British society, while the intervening weeks will use Orwell’s writings as a launch pad to explore key issues in interwar British and European history. Each week will consist of a one-hour source-based seminar in which we will analyze one of Orwell’s works followed by a two-hour class in which we will discuss relevant secondary literature.
Seminar topics may include: George Orwell’s politics and the politics of George Orwell; The Road to Wigan Pier, unemployment and British communism; Keep the Aspidistra Flying and modern consumer culture; Shooting and Elephant and the future of the British empire; Homage to Catalonia and Britain’s response to the Spanish Civil War; The Lion and the Unicorn and interwar Englishness; Inside the Whale and political apathy; Animal Farm, the British Left and Soviet Russia.
Key texts:
Robert Colls, George Orwell: English Rebel Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters Raymond Williams, George Orwell EP Thompson, “Outside the Whale” The Complete Works of George Orwell, available online at http://www.orwell.ru/library/index_en
For further information: Please contact the module convenor fir further information Dr Sarah Kenny, [email protected] MODULE TITLE “American Dreamers:” Radicalism in the United States from 1776 to present MODULE CODE 32001 CREDIT VALUE 20 ASSESSMENT METHOD 3 hour exam in Summer term TEACHING METHOD TBC SEMESTER 2
Please note that this module has extremely limited availability, we would only recommend selecting this module if it is compulsory for your studies.
DESCRIPTION
From the dream of abolitionists to end slavery to the fights for civil rights and racial equality of the 1960s; from the revolutionary plans to seize the Federal government of nineteenth century socialists to the restless efforts of women’s and gay rights movements for gender equality during the 1970s and beyond, rebels, revolutionaries and radicals have been a constant presence in the American political scenario. Adopting a chronological and thematic approach, this module will introduce students to the most important strands of American radicalism, including revolutionary republicanism; abolitionism; socialism, anarchism and communism; the New Left and counterculture; black nationalism; sexual liberation; indigenous movements and no-global movements. Using a wealth of primary sources (such as political pamphlets, flyers, letters, newspapers, photos, etc.) and secondary literature, this module will ask students to reflect on the way in which American radicalism has contributed to change principles of citizenship, democracy and freedom in the United States.
Seminar topics may include:
The American Revolution, Abolitionism and slave resistance, Labour and Populism during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, Anarchism, Socialism and Communism in the Early Twentieth Century, Black Radicalism: from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Power, The New Left and counterculture, Latinx and Red Power in the 1960s and beyond, Women’s Rights, Gay liberation, Radicalism today: from Occupy to Black Lives Matter.
Key texts:
Howard Brick, Christopher Phelps, Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War (Cambridge, 2015) Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class (London, 1982) Michael Kazin, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (New York, 2011) Timothy P. McCharty, John C. McMillan (eds.), The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition (New York, 2003) Werner Sombart, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (1906)
For more information:
Please contact the module convenor, Dr Lorenzo Costaguta: [email protected]
MODULE TITLE Life After Death: Culture, Politics and Memory in Post-War Europe, 1945-1973 MODULE CODE 32003 CREDIT VALUE 20 ASSESSMENT METHOD 3 hour exam in Summer term TEACHING METHOD TBC SEMESTER 2
DESCRIPTION
This course explores European society, culture and politics in the aftermath of the Second World War. Taking in the eastern block in addition to the continent’s western half, the option analyses how democratic and authoritarian regimes set about rebuilding the continent politically and economically following the devastation of the Second World War, and the cultural resources they sought to mobilize for that purpose. The course’s chief focus, however, will be on the societies these governments ruled over, and the ways they sought to confer meaning to the traumas of the recent past, and to create new life in the post-war era. The contested politics of memory accordingly occupies a central position within the course- a theme which will be explored via literature, film and visual culture in addition to historical works. The course begins with analysis of the Second World War’s aftermaths in 1945 and concludes amidst the cultural and economic upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as the revolutions of ‘1968’. Students wishing to sample the themes central to this course are advised to read Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, (London, 2005).
Seminar topics may include:
The legacies of the Second World War in Europe after 1945 Cultures of Memory concerning the Second World War The Rise of Christian Democracy in Western Europe and State Socialism in the Eastern Block Gender, Consumption and Family Life during the 1950s Cultural Shifts during the 1960s The Revolutions of 1968
Key texts:
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, (London, 2005). Ian Kershaw, Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017, (London, 2018), chapters 1-6. Richard Bessel and Dirk Schuhmann eds., Life After Death: Approaches to a Social and Cultural History During the 1950s and 1950s, (Cambridge, 2003). Robert Gildea, James Mark and Anette Warring ed., Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt, (Oxford, 2013).
For further information:
Please contact the module convenor, Dr Thomas Brodie: [email protected]