HY120      One Unit
Historical Approaches to the Modern World

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

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This course provides a foundation to allow first-year historians to come to grips with the many ways in which historians pursue their craft. The year begins with a critical discussion of History as a discipline. We ask what history is, how it is approached, the methods historians use, and think about the different the archives and sources that they study. Having done so, we will explore the use of non-textual sources, which are often neglected. As we encounter these sources, and the methods used to engage with them, we will maintain a critical approach to the work historians do and the archives they use for their research.

Next, we will survey various approaches and sub-fields within history, using case studies that apply scalar and spatial methodologies as points of reference. In the second term, our focus will shift to cultural and social history as influential paradigms in historical research. Cultural history concentrates on identities, subjectivities, representation, and ideas. Conversely, social history emphasises the everyday lives of ordinary or marginalised individuals, as well as the history of commodities. Following this, we will turn our attention to international and transnational history, exploring the opportunities these perspectives offer and examining how international affairs impact, and are impacted by, environmental changes. Finally, we will conclude the course by reflecting on the significance and evolving nature of global history over time.

While exploring these themes, the course also introduces the key skills required of a historian: navigating a reading list; taking notes; composing reading summaries; identifying & using historiography; approaching essay questions; developing an argument; structuring essays; footnoting and evidence; and avoiding plagiarism. In the Winter Term, we will focus on how to develop a research project, choosing a set of research questions, an archive and a method and critically exploring them in an assessed essay.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Winter Term.
10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn and Winter Term.

Students will be expected to produce 2 essays (each 1,500 words) across the AT and the WT.

• Bentley, Jerry H., ‘Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis’, Geographical Review, 89, 2 (1999): 215-24.
• Berger, Stefan, Heiko Feldner, Kevin Passmore (eds), Writing History: Theory and Practice, 2nd ed. (2010).
• Briggs, Laura, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and US Imperialism in Puerto Rico (2002)
• Burke, Peter, What is Cultural History?, 2nd ed. (2008).
• Cannadine, David, ed. What Is History Now? (2002)
• Clavin, P. and G. Sluga (eds), Internationalisms:  A Twentieth Century History (2017).
• Conrad, Sebastian, What is Global History? (2016).
• Davis, Natalie Zemon, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (1987).
• Dobson, Miriam, and Benjamin Ziemann (eds.), Reading Primary Sources: the Interpretation of Texts from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century (2009)
• Elmore, Bartow, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (2014).
• Iggers, Georg, Supriya Mukherjee and Quingjia E. Wang, ‘Historical Thought and Historiography: Current Trends’, pp. 39-47 in Wright, James D. International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2015) [doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.62028-7] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/referenceworks/9780080970875.
• Jordanova, Ludmila, History in Practice, 3rd edition (2017).
• Kelly, Marian Patrick, Sovereign Emergencies: Latin America and the Making of Global Human Rights Politics (2018).
• Lorenz, Chris, ‘History: Theories and Methods’, 131-37 in Wright, James D. International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2015)  [doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.62142-6
• Loughran, Tracey (ed.), A Practical Guide to Studying History: Skills and Approaches (2017).
• McCullagh, C Behan  ‘Historical Explanation, Theories of: Philosophical Aspects’, 10-16, in Wright, James D. International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2015) [/doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.63087-8]
• McNeill, J. R., The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (2015).
• Paine, Lincoln, The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (2013).
• Presnell, Jenny (ed.), The Information-Literate Historian: A Guide to Research for History Students, 3rd ed. (2018).
• Putnam, Lara, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (2013).
• Schlotterbeck, Marian, Beyond the Vanguard: Everyday Revolutionaries in Allende’s Chile (2018).
• Sheehan, James, ‘Political History: History of Politics’, pp. 380-85 in Wright, James D. International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2015)
• Stoler, Anne Laura, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2010).
• Tosh, John, Why History Matters (2008).
• Tosh, John, The Pursuit of History:  Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of History, 6th ed. (2015).
• Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 2nd ed. (2015).

Course participation (20%)

Essay (80%, 3000 words)