The dimensions of international history are often dizzyingly high and expansively large. Indeed, this is the advantage of reviewing history above and beyond the local and the national; we are able to produce grander narratives with more ambitious implications. But however far-righted our analysis, no form of history can lose its human element, its humanity. After all, whatever the international architecture of an age might be, its building blocks are always individuals, carrying with them all the subjectivities, cultural assumptions and ideologies of their milieu. Now in 2019 more than ever, we see that personal autonomy and personal experience matter on the international stage as much as at the domestic fireside.

This module makes and reinforces that argument by introducing students to a range of primary sources from individual people who lived international lives. By becoming intimately familiar with these historical figures, their experiences and their impact on events, students will learn to distinguish large impersonal forces from very human actions, and will thereby refine and finesse their understanding of international history. As students work with and from primary documentation, they will also develop the direct practical skills of the professional historian, accommodating various ways of looking at historical evidence, extracting historical information, and interpreting that information from the perspective of various historical schools, from empiricism to gender history and postcolonialism.

ESSAY ONE 20%: 1,000 words, Learning Outcomes 1, 2, 4
REPORT 20%: 1,000 words, Learning Outcomes 1, 3, 4
ESSAY TWO 50%: 3,000 words, Learning Outcomes 1-4
PARTICIPATION 10%: Learning Outcomes 1-4

Students will be required to do four things each week of the semester:

1. Read or experience a relevant primary source document in full. This will ordinarily be a written text made available online, but may also be a video, voice recording or other medium

2. Supplement this document with wider historiographical reading relevant to the document’s content. This should partly come from the relevant week’s folder in the ‘Learning Materials’ tab of recommended secondary literature, and partly from one’s own independent literature search

3. Contribute to the relevant weekly discussion on the Blackboard site, including making one’s own post and replying to the posts of others on the module

4. Plan for, prepare for or write one of the three items of formal assessed work (that is: Essay ONE, the Critical Review, and Essay TWO)

Students will receive regular formative feedback from the module leader on the module’s Blackboard discussion board and, where requested, via email. Summative feedback will follow all three formal assessments in the usual manner.

1. Demonstrate an understanding of the importance of the historical self in the development of international history.

Knowledge and Understanding

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

Analysis

3. Develop an understanding of major historiographical methodologies and demonstrate an ability to apply them to historical information.

Enquiry

4. Develop the study skills necessary to write effectively in academic assignments.

Communication

Library access and Blackboard

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.