Blitzed Brits: Politics, Society and Culture in the Second World War

Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and Understanding

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

• the broad range of scholarship produced on the topic of the Second World War
• the history of the Second World War in Britain
• the key debates about British identity and the Second World War

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• display effective time management
• work independently and unsupervised for extended periods of time on complex tasks
• write speedily yet fluently for extended periods, clearly articulating your ideas
• skim, select and précis complex material
• write in a mature and sophisticated style, with graduate-level prose and presentation

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• gather, assimilate, synthesise and interpret a range of primary and secondary material
• draw upon your acquired knowledge in discussion, essays and under timed conditions
• demonstrate significant depth of knowledge and insight into the advantages and disadvantages of a variety of strategic approaches
• fluently comment upon complex debates, citing relevant evidence in support

The module will use a variety of primary sources – government documents, films and documentaries, newspapers, novels and poems, TV shows and radio programmes, songs and plays, advertisements and historical objects – to create a detailed history of the Second World War and answer a number of important questions. Why did the British government appease Hitler? How did the country slide into war? Was there really a Dunkirk Spirit, or a Blitz Spirit? How did women, people of colour, the working classes, refugees and other groups experience the war? Did people really Keep Calm and Carry On? Why did the British voters kick Churchill out in 1945? And how has the war become part of modern collective memory?

List of indicative topics:

The Second World War in Popular Culture

Appeasement: The Guilty Men?

Rearmament and The Road to War

Mass Observation Diaries

The Phony War

The Ministry of Information: Wartime Propaganda

Evacuation and Conscription

Life and Leisure on the Home Front

Alien Panics, Internment and Refugees

The 'Miracle' of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain

The Myth of the Blitz

The War and the Empire

Make Do and Mend – Mobilising the Home Front

Defending Britain: The Home Guard

Overpaid Oversexed and Over Here – the GIs in Britain

Sex and the Home Front

The Beveridge Report and Social Reform

Victory! VE Day, VJ Day and Returning Home

The 1945 Election

The Second World War in Modern Memory

Teaching and learning methods

Teaching methods include:

• Lectures which build a narrative of the Second World War and focus on specific case studies to build understanding of key themes
• Seminars which focus on historiographical debates and the analysis of primary material
• Essays, gobbet analysis and timed examination

Learning activities include:

• Analysis of selected key readings in the historiography
• Preparatory reading and individual study
• Individual participation in seminars and group work on seminar themes
• Analysis of primary material, including using the Mass Observation database to select a key primary source and present it in the assessed gobbet exercise

Resources & Reading list

Textbooks

Juliet Gardiner (2004). Wartime Britain 1939-1945 .

Nicholas Timmins (2001). The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State .

Noakes, Lucy and Pattinson, Juliet (2013). British Cultural Memory and the Second World War .

Dorothy Sheridan (2000). Wartime Women A Mass-Observation Anthology .

Braybon, Gill and Summerfield, Penny (1987). Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars.

Sonya Rose (2003). Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939-45.

Ugolini, Wendy and Pattinson, Juliet . Fighting for Britain: negotiating identities in Britain during the Second World War.

Mark Donnelly (1999). Britain in the Second World War .

Brivati, Brian and Jones, Helen (1996).  What Difference Did the War Make? .

David Edgerton (2005). Warfare State Britain, 1920-1970 .

Peter Clarke (2004). Hope and Glory Britain 1900‑2000 .

Angus Calder (1969). The People’s War Britain 1939-45 .

Hayes, Nick and Hill, Jeff (1999). ‘Millions Like Us’? British Culture in the Second World War.

Morgan, David and Evans, Mary (1993). The Battle for Britain: Citizenship and Ideology in the Second World War.

Assessment strategy

Students will complete three types of assessment. In the first, a gobbet exercise, students will use the Mass Observation database to select any relevant primary source relating to the Second World War: they will then write a gobbet response analysing the primary source and explaining why they chose to foreground this source. The second, an assessed essay, will be chosen from a list of topics that relate to specific case studies on the course. The final piece of assessment, a timed exam, will analyse some of the broader themes of the course and invite students to make connections between the different topics covered on the module.

Summative

Summative assessment description

Referral

Referral assessment description

Repeat

Repeat assessment description

Repeat Information

Repeat type: Internal & External