HI5030 - Debating History

You will learn through weekly lectures in the first semester and first four weeks of the second semester. These lectures will provide broad overviews of historiographical themes and concepts. In addition, weekly seminars will offer you the opportunity to engage with some of these themes and/or concepts in a more detailed manner. Later in the second semester the delivery pattern changes. Your seminar group will meet for 3 x 1.5 hour workshops as you receive training in independent research methods, including developing a research question; searching for historiographical essays and reviews; and building a bibliography of secondary literature.

Your academic development will be supported through engagement with your peers, academic tutors, and programme leaders. Academic support is provided through group/individual tutorials which allow specific issues to be addressed and to promote progress in academic development. The module tutor will be accessible within publicised office hours and via email. Your peers will provide you with a collaborative learning environment, and your programme leader will guide you through the requirements and expectations of your course. You will also be supported through individual engagement with the academic literature, lectures, and resources available on the eLearning Portal. Formative feedback will be on-going throughout workshop activities and through assessment tasks.

All modules at Northumbria include a range of reading materials that students are expected to engage with. Online reading lists (provided after enrolment) give you access to your reading material for your modules. The Library works in partnership with your module tutors to ensure you have access to the material that you need.

Knowledge & Understanding:
1. Demonstrate an understanding of major themes in modern Western historiography.
2. Exhibit an awareness of major concepts and issues associated with the nature and character of history.
3. Demonstrate an advanced ability to consider the importance of debate and historiography in written form.

Intellectual / Professional skills & abilities:
4. Demonstrate the acquisition of numerous skills including the ability to make independent critical judgments, handle a variety of historical theories and apply various historical concepts when appropriate.

Personal Values Attributes (Global / Cultural awareness, Ethics, Curiosity) (PVA):
5. Critically evaluate conflicting positions in significant debates or controversies.

Your knowledge and understanding of history and historiography, your ability to analyse and critically discuss theories, their assumptions and application, and present a variety of evidence will be tested in two pieces of written work.

The two essays (each of them 2,500 words long and weighted 50%) will span the breadth of the module’s coverage: one on a broad theme in modern historiography, and one, with a question developed by the student, under tutorial guidance, that explores the impact of one of the historiographical debates in the course in a specific area of historical work that they have encountered elsewhere in their study.
MLOs 1-5.

You will have the opportunity to present your work in the seminars and will receive formative feedback from your lecturer in classroom discussions, debates, and tutorial sessions. Formative assessment through your lecturer will be written and verbal, and you will also receive feedback through engagement with your peers who will enable you to test your explanations about the nature of historiography and allow you to form your own understanding of historical interpretations.

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This year-long module will introduce you to the main themes in Western historiography since the late nineteenth century (broadly speaking, the professional era). Within a largely chronological framework, the first half of the module will introduce you to significant approaches to the study of history, including empiricism, the Whig interpretation, Marxist approaches, cultural history, the postmodern approach, the transnational turn, environmental history, and the history of the emotions. Running throughout the lecture and seminar course are questions relating to how we know things from the past; and how the concerns of the present might or might not motivate historians’ work. Halfway through the second semester, you will have the opportunity to apply these debates to a concrete example from one of the other historical themes you are studying in another history module. You will receive training in independent research skills to help you approach this task. The module is assessed by two essays. These essays will span the breadth of the module’s coverage. One is on a broad theme in modern historiography. The second tackles a question, developed by the student, under tutorial guidance, that explores the impact of a historiographical debate. You may have encountered this debate in this module; alternatively, you might write about an historical controversy and debate that you have studied elsewhere at level 5.