This 30 CATS final-year undergraduate advanced option deals with one of the most significant episodes in world history: the French Revolution. Promethean and tragic, it has inspired and haunted imaginations throughout the modern era. 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times', wrote Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities, and, indeed, historians still argue over its paradoxical legacies. For while it inaugurated human rights, universal manhood suffrage and civil equality, it also unleashed terror, authoritarianism and empire. The French Revolution is especially challenging to study since it bequeathed the very terms we use to analyse it. Debates about liberal and social forms of democracy, the viability or dangers of Enlightenment ideals, and the necessity or gratuitousness of violence to bring about democracy all grew out of the French Revolution itself. To study the French Revolution is to put our own conceptual categories and values into question.
This module treats the origins, course and legacies of the French Revolution. It draws on a wide range of sources: primary, scholarly, literary and cinematic. Themes include ideas, emotions, inequality, freedom, capitalism, gender, race, colonialism, religion, terror and war. It is inspired by the belief that studying the French Revolution can help us better understand the challenges of modern democratic and capitalist societies. By making modernity more legible, it can make our future more navigable.
This 30 CATS undergraduate final-year Special Subject module aims to teach students about the development of printing in Renaissance and Early Modern Italy and how print intertwined with manuscript and oral media to create the dynamic communications culture of the period. This module does not require any prerequisite modules from previous years of study, but students not studying a single or joint honours history degree will not normally be permitted to take this module.
This 30 CATS first-year option module is an introduction to the modern social and political history of sub-Saharan Africa. The course takes a chronological approach, covering three broad periods: the nineteenth-century precolonial period, colonial rule, and the postcolonial period. Starting with a discussion of the idea of ‘Africa’, students will familiarise themselves with the changing nature of African trade and commerce after the ending of the slave trade; with the character and development of political authority in the nineteenth century; with the establishment of colonial rule through treaty and conquest; with the effects of colonialism on colonised African societies; with the growth of anti-colonial sentiments and the emergence of nationalisms; and with the impact of decolonization and the formation of postcolonial states. The final lectures and seminars will explore the nature of postcolonial African states, and include discussion of episodes of violence and of ‘development’ in Africa.
Weekly lectures will provide a chronological framework. Seminars elaborate the themes from the lectures, but concentrate on regional case studies and debates within the historiography
The Reformation triggered the single most significant set of transformations in early modern Europe.
Religion and confessional allegiance shaped the social, economic and political culture of the Continent
for centuries to come. The protagonist of the German Reformation, Martin Luther, is universally
recognised as one of the outstanding historical figures of all times. This module asks why.