Department of Cultural and Creative Industries BA (Hons) History
UWE History Reading recommendations, resources and first-year textbooks
UWE History: reading recommendations
The best way to prepare for a History degree is to read history books which interest you! We encourage students to read as widely as possible about any period of history that you find interesting – it is only by reading that you discover what kinds of history you like.
Hopefully you will find the suggested reading and resources below both useful and entertaining – though you shouldn’t treat them as some kind of prescriptive syllabus, but merely as guides to further exploration. They are intended to give you an idea of the kind of material you might engage with during your degree at UWE.
You are not expected to purchase a large number of the history books on the list, nor to read exhaustively from them before you start your undergraduate studies.
The below are only suggestions, and please don't feel restricted to only reading what we recommend…
General interest history books
This list includes books that you should find useful, accessible and engaging. It covers work that addresses the question ‘what is history’ – essentially books that examine and explain why and how historians study the past. It also includes texts that might be described as “classic” history books – books that had a significant impact on the discipline (even if they might now be rather dated!) and important primary texts.
Others offer an introduction to the study of new topics, are cutting edge, or might simply broaden your horizons.
The dates listed are original publication dates – but many of the texts have more recent editions.
What is history?
E.H. Carr, What is History? (1961) Carr's book was originally published in 1961, but is still regarded as one of the most influential texts when it comes to writing and thinking about history.
Richard Evans, In Defence of History (1997) Regarded by some as a successor to Carr.
David Cannadine, What is History Now? (2002) Asks a new generation of scholars to answer some of the questions posed by Carr.
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John Tosh, The Pursuit of History (1984)
John Tosh, ed., Historians on History? (2000)
Anna Green and Kathleen Troup, The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in History and Theory (1999)
Sarah Maza, Thinking About History (2017)
Lynn Hunt, History: Why It Matters (2018)
The Institute of Historical Research's website, Reviews in History, also provides an up-to-date overview of developments in the field.
General interest, “classics”, and important primary texts
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (1791)
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African: Written by Himself (1789)
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972)
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (1980)
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971)
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984)
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou (trans. 1978)
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Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1976)
Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (1969)
Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women's Oppression and the Fight Against It (1973)
Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (1983)
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 (1987)
Binyavanga Wainaina, ‘How to write about Africa’, Granta (2005)
Alison Light, Common People: The History of an English Family (2014)
David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016)
Matt Houlbrook, Prince of Tricksters: The Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook (2016)
Toby Green, A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (2019)
Emma Griffin, Breadwinner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy (2020)
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Introductory and survey texts relevant to first-year modules
The modules you take in the first year of your History degree span a range of topics, periods, themes, approaches and geographical areas – offering a broad approach in order to underpin the option modules you may take in your second and third years.
Along with the above list, there are a number of useful introductory and general texts that you might find helpful. The below are a range of survey texts that broadly correspond to the material covered on some of the first-year modules:
G. L. Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England 1360-1461 (2005)
Keith Wrightson, ed, A Social History of England 1500-1750 (2017)
Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World 1550-1800 (2008)
Susan Kingsley Kent, A New History of Britain since 1688: Four Nations and an Empire (2016)
Madge Dresser, Slavery Obscured: The Social History of the Slave Trade in Bristol (2001)
John Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1997)
Frank O'Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political and Social History, 1688-1832 (1997)
Callum G. Brown and W. Hamish Fraser, Britain since 1707 (2010)
Francesca Carnevali and Julie-Marie Strange, eds., Twentieth-Century Britain: Economic, Cultural and Social Change (2007)
Paul Addison and Harriet Jones, A Companion to Contemporary Britain, 1939-2000 (2005)
Bernard Porter, The Lion's Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850 to the Present (2020)
Norman Davies, Europe: A History (1996)
Beat Kümin, ed., The European World 1500-1800: An Introduction to Early Modern History (2009)
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John Merriman, A History of Modern Europe: From the Renaissance to the Age of Napoleon (2009)
Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History? (2017)
C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1750–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (2004)
D'Maris Coffman, Adrian Leonard and William O'Reilly, The Atlantic World (2014)
C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (2001)
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (2008)
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 (2010)
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (2010)
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (2020)
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (2006)
Anthony D. Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (1995)
Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949 (2016)
Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (1999)
Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (2013)
Jerald A. Combs, The History of American Foreign Policy from 1895 (2012)
Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2005)
Ralph B. Levering, The Cold War: A Post-Cold War History (2016)
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Short fiction Some shorter fiction books to while away your leisure hours. We think these are worth reading and thinking about, although are in no sense claiming that these are the best or most important books! In fact, feel free to challenge our suggestions - it is all part of the pleasure of such lists.
Voltaire, Candide (1759) Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) Honoré de Balzac, Old Goriot (1835) Ivan Turgenev, Home of the Gentry (1859) H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895) Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915) John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) Franz Kafka, The Trial, 1915 (1925 posthumous publication) Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925) Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (1928) Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1940) Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941) Albert Camus, The Outsider (1942) George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
JD Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951) Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse (1954) Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1954) Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955) Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955)
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James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956) Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958) Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963) Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five (1969) Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood (1987)
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Documentaries and podcasts This is not by any means an exhaustive list – but everything listed is currently free to watch / listen.
Documentaries A House Through Time: Guinea Street, Bristol. Historian David Olusoga sets out to uncover the history of a single house – this time in Bristol. Telling the story of a house as well as a place and a city, this series covers everything from the tobacco industry to piracy, and from slavery to the Bristol Blitz. Spotlight on the Troubles: A Secret History. Eight-part documentary series offering new insights into the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
The Cold War: CNN Complete Series.
Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 A re-evaluation of acid house, a musical phenomenon that, as this film shows, did not spring out of nowhere, but owed its emergence to the social and political landscape of 1980s Britain.
Morning in the Streets (1959). A 1959 BBC documentary featuring footage of working-class people and street scenes in Liverpool, accompanied by a montage soundtrack of voices conveying opinions and philosophies on life.
Civilisation(s) (1969) and (2018). Civilisation is a documentary series written and presented by the art historian Kenneth Clark, outlining the history of Western art, architecture and philosophy, which aired in 1969. Inspired by this series, ‘Civilisations’ sees Simon Schama, David Olusoga and Mary Beard travel the world to explore human creativity and the development of art through the ages.
Miss World 1970: Beauty Queens and Bedlam. The story of the 1970 Miss World contest, where feminist protestors dramatically disrupted the event.
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Podcasts
Popular History magazines, including: History Today or BBC History, which has weekly podcasts. BBC Radio 4: In our time. Radio discussion series exploring a wide variety of historical topics - each programme covers a specific historical, philosophical, religious, cultural or scientific topic.
BBC Radio 4: A History of the World in 100 objects. Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, narrates 100 programmes that retell humanity's history through the objects we have made.
Hay Festival Podcast. Conversations with a range of guest writers and thinkers from the Hay festival.
BBC Radio 4: Voices from the Old Bailey. Professor Amanda Vickery presents dramatised extracts from gripping Old Bailey court cases from the eighteenth century and discusses with fellow historians what they reveal about the period.
BBC Radio 4: The Reunion. Documentary series which reunites a group of people intimately involved in a moment of modern history.
BBC Radio 4: The Long View. Series in which stories from the past are compared with current events.
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Open-access online resources and databases
Old Bailey Online: The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913. A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.
London Lives, 1690-1900: Crime, Poverty and Social Policy in the Metropolis. A fully digitised and searchable range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners.
Know Your Place: West of England. A digital heritage mapping resource to help you to explore your neighbourhood online through historic maps, collections and linked information. It covers: Bristol, Bath & North East Somerset, Gloucestershire, North Somerset, Somerset, South Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Devon.
Legacies of British Slave Ownership Database Colonial slavery shaped modern Britain and we all still live with its legacies. This database contains, first, the identity of all slave-owners in the British colonies at the time slavery ended and, second, all the estates in the British Caribbean colonies.
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