Built around a series of personal primary sources, from memoir to correspondence and artwork, this module has three core aims. The first is to teach students the rudimental skills necessary to interrogate primary source materials in order to extract historical information. The second is to inform students of some of the larger historiographical trends which have coloured the discipline since its inception. The third is to introduce some of the key study skills necessary for students to successfully fulfil their course, including referencing, writing introductions and conclusions and creating a bibliography.

Essay research, planning, writing, drafting, referencing assesses achievement in Learning Outcomes Knowledge and Understanding, Analysis, Enquiry, Communication.

Essay 1 50%: 1,500 words, Learning Outcomes: Knowledge and Understanding, Analysis, Enquiry, Communication.
Essay 2 50%: 1,500 words, Learning Outcomes: Knowledge and Understanding, Analysis, Enquiry, Communication.

Key Information Set Data:
100% Coursework

Each week will feature a lecture introducing students to some of the historiographical, historical and skills-based knowledge necessary to successfully interrogate that week’s primary source. In the seminars students will be asked to analyse and discuss the source in question, with which they will have thoroughly familiarised themselves in advance. Seminars will also feature some opportunity to develop the students’ study skills. For example, they may be asked to write an introductory paragraph on that week’s primary source, or to create a footnote for it.

1. Demonstrate an understanding of the changing experience of the individual and the self in the modern era

Knowledge and Understanding

2. Employ some basic historiographical assumptions and methodologies and demonstrate an ability to apply them to historical information

Analysis

3. Deploy the skills necessary to critically interrogate primary source materials in order to extract historical information from them

Enquiry

4. Utilise some of the study skills necessary to write and speak effectively in academic presentations and academic assignments

Communication

Library access and Blackboard VLE.

S. Barber (ed.), 2008. History Beyond the Text, Routledge.
E. H. Carr, 2008. What is History?, Penguin.
M. Dobson and B. Ziemann (eds), 2008. Reading Primary Sources: The Interpretation of Texts from Nineteenth and Twentieth Century History, Routledge.
A. Freund and A. Thomson (eds), 2011. Oral History and Photography, Springer.
R. Howells (ed.), 2009. Using Visual Evidence, Open University Press.
D. A. Ritchie, 1995. Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide, Oxford University Press.