Themes in Modern British History

Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• a diverse range of case-studies and scholarship on ordinary people’s histories in 19th and 20th century Britain
• recent developments in the historiography of social and cultural history, and their roots in longer-established historiographical fields
• methodological approaches to studying the histories of experience and identity

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• sophisticatedly analyse primary and secondary sources about modern British history and present your ideas cogently in written work
• critically reflect on how the use of a variety of conceptual tools shape our thinking and affect the way we approach topics and their study
• think more critically about the processes by which sources are constructed, about what is captured by the historical record, and about the possibility of surmounting the challenges that these processes present

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• engage in close and thoughtful reflection about primary source materials
• communicate your ideas more precisely
• develop your own research project that reflects your engagement with sources and secondary material

Historians have become interested in ‘ordinary people’ again in recent years. Why? This module explores this question through looking at case-studies of women’s, men’s and children’s histories in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, and at varieties of ‘ordinary sources’. We examine how a focus on ‘the ordinary’ maps onto, and complicates, other historically-shifting identities – race, ethnicity, class, gender, age, ability, region, and religious faith – and the implications. Claire Langhamer has asked, ‘Who do we mean when we refer to ordinary people and who did the people we study mean?’ (2018), and we will also consider this key question through tracing the roots of the historiographical turn to ‘the ordinary’.

The current intention is to deliver teaching for this module online. If circumstances allow, some form of blended delivery methods, including seminars, workshops, or individual tutorials may be introduced if it is safe for all concerned to do so. However, delivery will remain entirely online if face to face teaching is not possible or advisable.

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.