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:

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

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’.

Teaching and learning methods

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.