MODULE SPECIFICATION
Code: UPHPLN-30-2 Title: Public History: Representations of the past, 1400 to the present Version: 2
Level: 2 UWE credit rating: 30 ECTS credit rating: 15
Module type: Standard
Owning Faculty: Social Sciences and Humanities Field: History
Faculty Committee approval: QSC, Chair’s Action Date: 16th July 2009
Approved for Delivery by:
(indicate name of affiliated institution if module will only be delivered by them)
Valid from: September 2009 Discontinued from:
Contributes towards: Awards up to BA (Hons)
Pre-requisites: None
Co-requisites: None
Entry requirements:
(if the module is offered as CPD or stand alone, indicate the entry requirements)
Excluded combinations: None
Learning outcomes:
On successful completion of this module, students will be able to:
1. Understand and interpret the variety of ways in which the past has been used, both presently and in the past (assessed in component B, element 2);
2. Debate the significance of the public sphere and the relationship to it of collective identity through the notion of public history, heritage and historical dissemination (assessed in component A);
3. Compare and evaluate two broad levels of uses of the past: academic history and public ‘popular’ representations of the past (assessed in components A and B, element 2);
4. Analyse conceptually and practically the multiple forms by which historical representations shape the world beyond university (assessed in component A);
5. Discuss historical representations within the mass communications media (assessed in component A);
6. Reflect upon the notion of collective memory (assessed in components A and B, element 2);
7. Appraise various popular history approaches and methods, including oral history (assessed in components A and B, element 2);
8. Explore the problems of traumatic events and the public culture and politics of reconciliation and apology (assessed in components A and B, element 2).
Syllabus outline:
Students will explore understanding, representation and use of the past beyond the academic/professional sphere in the past and in the present. The syllabus facilitates engagement with the meeting points of academic history with communities, groups, bodies and institutions that have a use for history and have helped construct the shape and nature of its popular understanding. The primary focus is the public inter-section of communities, heritage, and collective memory. The syllabus is based on weekly lectures (given by most colleagues in the School of History) and seminars (taught by the module leader and one other – the module will be capped at 30 students). There will be some level of chronological order to both lectures and seminars, although the two terms will be based on two broad themes: 1. (firmly historical) the development of notions of the past in the past and 2. (more contemporary) dealing with the past: public and popular historical culture, post 1945 (particularly since 1989, a watershed represented by the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the development of a global popular culture of remembrance).
Lectures and seminars in both terms will focus on particular themes which benefit from the range of School expertise. Seminar content will reflect the main themes of the module, broadly to include public history, oral traditions and oral history, official memory and the state, nationalisms, national and regional identity, the effects and representations of war, colonialism, conflict and memory, and trauma, reconciliation and apology.
Specific subjects for lectures will vary from year to year but could include some of the following. 1.Historical study of notions of the past: foundation myths and their use in the Middle Ages; physical spaces and landscapes; the beginnings of modern classical scholarship and archaeology in the Renaissance; community and memory in early-modern Europe, symbolic destruction of the past during the French Revolution; the famine and Irish identity; the Republic in the French sense of the past; cultural critiques of industrialisation; Spanish Catholic theories of history in the nineteenth century; British Empire and the past; collective memory and the Russian Revolution, 1914-18 in popular memory; Stalinism and history; twentieth-century civil wars and foundation myths.
2. Contemporary popular culture and how it deals with the past: local, regional and national identities and contemporary representations of the past (including Bristol and the West of England, but also other localities and regions, beyond the West and beyond Europe: has ‘the nation’ declined as main focus of popular history?); societies and associations for the discussion of history; slavery and the culture and politics of museums; the colonial legacy and forms of patrimony; monuments and other sites of memory of the Great War; coming to terms with the Nazi past; the Jewish Holocaust (museums, politics, personal and public narratives, etc); post-1945 commemorations; oral history: its aims, popularity and organisation; the Women’s History Society; 1989 and ‘the end of history’; Ireland, history and the peace process; heritage, tourism and the economy; publishing and the ‘branding’ off the past; TV history, the internet and mass media; education and the national curriculum; generational evolution and popular history; excavating the past (archaeology and war memories); truth and reconciliation: comparative analysis of the culture and politics of apology (slavery, empire, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, death in Russia, etc).
Teaching and learning methods:
Weekly lectures and seminars. Lectures will provide an overview of topics and each one will be delivered by a specialist in the field. The seminars will develop ways of tackling the conceptual and methodological problems associated with public dissemination, debate and commercialisation. Although some seminars will concentrate specifically on the subject of lectures, many will focus on broad ideas, concepts, and methodological issues.
Reading Strategy
There is no set text as such for this module though there are a number of key texts for many of the areas covered. A reasonable number of these are already held in the library and efforts will be made to consolidate these and to order extra copies and further titles as necessary between now and the beginning of 2007. There are also a great number of sources available electronically, either in the form of articles in scholarly journals (for which JSTOR will be recommended and made available through UWEOnLine). Students will have direct access to the following relevant journals: History Today, Oral History, History & Memory, The History Teacher, and The Regional Historian. Students will be supplied with detailed reading lists for each topic studied via UWEonline. Certain important book chapters can be digitised and made available via UWEonline.
Indicative Reading List (all available in St Matthias library):
Hilda Kean, Paul Martin & Sally J Morgan (eds), Seeing History: Public History in Britain Now (London: Francis Boutle, 2000)
Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier & Roy Rosenzweig (eds), Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986)
Peter J. Fowler, The Past in Contemporary Society: Then, Now (London: Routledge, 1992)
Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (eds), Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (London: Routledge, 1998)
Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995 )
David Boswell & Jessica Evans (eds), Representing the Nation, a Reader: Histories, Heritage, Museums (London: Routledge, 1999)
Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (London: MIT, 1995)
Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen, 1987)
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: CUP, 1998)
Kevin Moore, Museums and Popular Culture (Leicester: LUP, 1997)
Assessment
Weighting between components A and B (standard modules only) A: 50% B: 50%
ATTEMPT 1
First Assessment Opportunity
Component A
Description of each element Element weighting
1. Supervised group project - museum, exhibition or web site review (2,000 words) 50%
(Split 50-50 between group and individual).
Component B
Description of each element Element weighting
1. Literature review (750 words) 10%
2. Essay 1 (1,500 words) 20%
3. Essay 2 (1,500 words 20%
Second Assessment Opportunity (further attendance at taught classes is/not required)
Component A
Description of each element Element weighting
1. Exam (3 hours) 50%
Component B
Description of each element Element weighting
1. Literature review (750 words) 10%
2. Essay 1 (1,500 words) 20%
3. Essay 2 (1,500 words) 20%
SECOND (OR SUBSEQUENT) ATTEMPT Attendance at taught classes is required.
Specification confirmed by …………………………………………………Date ………………………
(Associate Dean/Programme Director)