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Themes in Modern British History

When you'll study it
Semester 1
CATS points
15
ECTS points
7.5
Level
Level 7
Module lead
John McAleer
Academic year
2025-26

Module overview

Historians have become interested in ‘ordinary people’ 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?’, and we will also consider this key question through tracing the roots of the historiographical turn to ‘the ordinary’, drawing on the wide-ranging expertise in the histories of modern Britain we have at Southampton.