Foundations of History

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 6
• Convenor: Mike Berlin
• Assessment: an 800-word assessment (nature of task to be confirmed) (20%) and 3200-word essay (80%), plus 60% attendance requirement

This module investigates the tools and techniques used by historians to ‘do’ history. We shall look at the very varied primary sources through which we study the past, from official reports, to diaries, letters, memoirs, newspapers, oral evidence, paintings, cartoons, music, film, architecture, landscape, archaeological remains, the web etc. We will consider how a secondary source differs from a primary one and the problems involved in interpreting a source.

Secondly we will explore the ‘theory’ of history, the varied assumptions of historians and the approaches they have adopted to the study of history.

Third, but in reality through all our sessions, we shall be thinking how the practice and ‘theory’ of history can help you to develop your own skills. This will involve very practical advice on how to undertake research, how to compile a bibliography, the mysteries of the footnote, and especially how to present one’s findings, i.e. write an essay or dissertation.

Indicative module syllabus

• What is History?
• Reading History: Secondary Sources
• Researching History: Primary Sources - Written and Visual
• Oral History
• Theories of History: Narrative - Herodotus to the present
• Committed History: Revolutionary Causation
• Social History: Total to Micro History
• Gender History
• Colonial/Post-Colonial History
• Deconstructing History: History and Memory - Public History

By the end of this module, you will:

• appreciate the changing concepts of history and how these are themselves shaped by changing historical contexts into different ‘schools of history’
• understand how historians use different sources and methods to write history
• recognise the ways in which different approaches and methods have contributed to changing historiographies of distinct subjects and themes in historical research
• appreciate the contingency and partiality of all forms of historical knowledge
• have gained new insights into how the work of the historian is itself shaped by changing social, cultural and intellectual contexts
• appreciate the practical and scholarly problems and issues involved in writing history
• practically apply learning to undertaking research and writing history.