Courses

This course is one of two 'core' courses on the online MSc in History. The aim of these two courses is to prepare students to undertake their dissertations. This course focuses on research skills and the analysis of different types of primary source.

More information can be found on the course catalogue: Historical Research: Skills & Sources

This course is one of two 'core' courses on the online MSc in History. The aim of these two courses is to prepare students to undertake their dissertations. This course focuses on approaches and methodologies that historians have employed in order to understand and write about the past.

More information can be found on the course catalogue: Historical Research: Approaches to History

This course examines the theory and practice of British imperialism between the late Elizabethan period and the mid-twentieth century. The focus is on the degree to which British imperialism changed over time.

More information can be found on the course catalogue: British Empires, 1601-1948

This course examines how and why ideals and practices of marriage in later Roman and post-Roman societies shifted between c.400 and c.1000. Focussing on a range of primary sources, students will gain a detailed understanding of how marriage was contested, disputed and transformed in this period, and will carefully examine the social, political and religious contexts of these developments. Students will also critically examine strikingly different ways in which historians have debated the evolution of marriage, gender, family and kinship within grand narratives of the transition from antiquity to the middle ages.

More information can be found on the course catalogue: Debating Marriage Between Antiquity and the Middle Ages 

The American South's distinctive history can be traced through slavery, secession, Civil War defeat, Reconstruction, Lost Cause ideology, populism, and the era of Jim Crow. Seminal southern journalist W. J. Cash summarized such understandings in his 1941 book, The Mind of the South, in which he claimed that the region's 'peculiar history ... has so greatly modified it from the general American norm' that it is 'not quite a nation within a nation, but the next thing to it.' In this course, we will chart the short-lived promise of Reconstruction, and the development of 'Jim Crow modernity,' as shifting residential patterns and urban expansion prompted a new form of racial control through legalized segregation and extra-legal violence at the turn of the twentieth century.

More information can be found on the course catalogue: Race, Religion, and Ridicule: The American South from Reconstruction to World War II

This course examines the murder of the European Jews during the Second World War, aspects of the past leading up to the genocide, and features of the way that the genocide has entered popular consciousness in the postwar years.

More information can be found on the course catalogue: The Holocaust

This course looks at the development and meaning of the concept(s) of 'empire' from the late sixteenth until the early seventeenth centuries, using the Stuart ideas of empire as its starting point.

More information can be found on the course catalogue: Theories of Empire in the Early Modern Period

The nineteenth-century saw structural changes in technologies and relations of work across the globe. As the expansion of European empires contributed to the growth of an integrated world market, categories of labour went into transformation to reflect new roles for women and men in economic production.

More information can be found on the course catalogue: Gender, Empire, and Labour in the Nineteenth Century: Perspectives from the Wider World

This course provides an introduction to the history of scholarship from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (c. 1550-1750), a period which arguably gave birth to the modern human sciences. It does so by examining one particular theme: the study of pagan myth (including the myths of Graeco-Roman antiquity, the myths of contemporary 'savages' and 'primitives', and the myths of the ancient pagan peoples mentioned in the Bible).

More information can be found on the course catalogue: Myth and the History of Scholarship in Early Modern Europe

This course will examine Cuban-American relations from the end of Spanish colonial rule in 1898 through to US President Barack Obama's decision to resume formal diplomatic relations in 2014.

More information can be found on the course catalogue: The Closest of Enemies: Cuban-American Relations 1898-2014

War is the most demanding of all human endeavours. Devising strategies and waging war has preoccupied leaders, states, and intellectuals since antiquity. This course examines major developments in the history of strategic thought and the refinement of military doctrine in the process of analysing how war is theorised in the contemporary world.

More information can be found on the course catalogue:  The Contemporary Theory of War

The course covers the origin, development and demise of the Clan Donald Lordship of the Isles, one of the most distinctive aristocratic lordships of late medieval Europe. The course will involve discussion of the most important stages in the development of the Clan Donald, but will also try to examine why the Lordship has become, in the modern era, such a powerful symbol of Gaelic linguistic and cultural identity.

More information can be found on the course catalogue:  The Lords of the Isles: Clan Donald, c.1336 - c.1545