HST21015 - The Uses of History

20 credits (Semester 2)

Module Leader: Dr David Vessey (2024-25)

Module Summary

This module explores the theory and practice of public history by providing students with the opportunity to communicate their scholarly work to an audience beyond the boundaries of our discipline. Students will articulate an aspect of their own historical interests to a non-academic audience and evaluate the use of history outside academic settings. The course will engage in debate about important questions facing historians in the present, and consider ideas about the role and purposes of History as an academic subject.

Teaching and Assessment:

Lectures introduce students to the theory and practice of public history. Seminars are built around two elements. First, a set of core and further readings will provide background and critical intervention on history outside academic settings. Second, group activities will give students the opportunity to apply their learning to real world public history projects and the critical evaluation of public history artefacts. Both of these exercises will provide formative preparation for the written assessments, while developing students’ teamworking capabilities. To help students with relating their work to a different audience, some workshop elements (e.g. discussing the ‘pitch’) will be built in.

Assessment

Please see this page for assessment details: Level 2 assessment

Module Aims

Introduce students to the theory and practice of public history. The module will help students apply their disciplinary knowledge beyond academic settings
Encourage students to think about how the learning they have undertaken on their degree might be relevant to – and translatable for – the world beyond the boundaries of academia.
Cultivate students’ transferable skills, including the ability to present academic research to a specific audience
Encourage critical reflection on the relationship between academic and public history, and provide space for to consider the potentials and challenges of the latter.

Selected Reading

There is no textbook or single text for the module, but if you wanted to read a book to get a sense of some of the key themes and ideas, then one of these would be

a good starting point:

Ashton, Paul and Hilda Khan (eds.), People and Their Pasts: Public History Today (Basingstoke, 2009)

de Groot, Jerome, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (London, 2016)

Rosenzweig, Roy and David Helen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York, 1998)

Sayer, Faye, Public History: A Practical Guide (London, 2019)

Intended Learning Outcomes

By the end of the module you will be able to:

Demonstrate capacity to communicate historical material to non-specialists in a manner that does justice to evidence and analysis.
Engage with debates about the relationship between academic research and popular understandings of the past.
Understand how history is deployed in society, and an ability to engage with the problems and challenges raised by a range of different uses of the past.
Demonstrate enhanced skills in debate and the presentation of argument and analysis in both oral and written contexts.
Work as part of a team, with an enhanced appreciation for the possibilities of collaborative learning.