Dr Taylor Sherman SAR M.10

This course is compulsory on the BA in History and BSc in International Relations and History. This course is available on the BSc in Politics and History. This course is not available as an outside option nor to General Course students.

This course provides a foundation to allow first-year historians to come to grips with the many different ways in which historians pursue their craft. The year begins with a critical discussion of the two institutions at the core of History: universities and archives. Students examine the power relations they sustain and the possibilities for change in the twenty-first century. Next students consider scalar and spatial approaches to history, and then they turn to global, international and transnational history. In the second term, the course explores approaches to identity, and then social history including commodities, sport and the history of clothing. Finally students explore non-textual sources. As students encounter these different methodologies, they maintain a critical approach to the work historians do and the archives they use for their research. While exploring these themes, the course also introduces students to 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; avoiding plagiarism; and critically engaging with archival materials.

Lectures will be online. The School aims to run in-person classes, subject to circumstances, with some online provision as and where necessary. There will be a reading week in the week 6 of the Michaelmas and the Lent Terms.

Students will be expected to produce 2 essays and 5 short pieces of group coursework across the MT and LT.

Regular Moodle posts are a component of the coursework for this course.

• Armitage, David, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram (eds), Oceanic Histories (2017).
• 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).
• 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).
• Elmore, Bartow, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (2014).
• Jordanova, Ludmila, History in Practice, 3rd edition (2017).
• Kelly, Marian Patrick, Sovereign Emergencies: Latin America and the Making of Global Human Rights Politics (2018).
• Loughran, Tracey (ed.), A Practical Guide to Studying History: Skills and Approaches (2017).
• 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).
• 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).
• Tsing, Anna, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015).

Exam (60%, duration: 2 hours) in the summer exam period.
Essay (40%, 2000 words) in the LT.

Some departments have produced short videos to introduce their courses. Please refer to the course selection videos index page for further information.