Empire, Science and the Environment

30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

The inter-relationship of Science and Empire has become a major field of historical research, involving such sub-disciplines or fields as as the natural sciences, technology, exploration, and race and ideology. Historians commonly address questions such as the utility of science to the practice and maintenance of empire, the diffusion of knowledge, the mutual influences of the metropole and the `periphery', and the role of umbrella organisations such as commonwealth universities, botanical gardens, the Royal Society, and the British Association.

This module explores these key concerns, tailored to the researching strengths of the course tutor.

Germany, France and the Making of the 20th Century Europe

30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

For all of the declarations about the need to write new integrated histories of the continent, modern European history is still predominantly taught and written as distinct and discrete national histories. In this module, by contrast. you will explore modern German and French history in an expressly integrated and comparative framework, addressing the ways in which these long-time historical enemies understood and interacted with each other since the late 19th century. To date, there is surprisingly little effort to consider these histories in relation to one another, and yet how these former antagonists became partners in European project of peace and stability in the second half of the last century is one of the most unlikely outcomes of the Second World War. You will therefore explore the entwined nature of these national histories, with a view to how their rivalry and reconciliation furnished much of the drama of European history over the course of the past one hundred years.

You will begin by studying the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and will assess its massive geopolitical impact for both countries and the reordering of European power, including the Commune in France and the new sense of national identity in Germany. You will then go on to discuss the divergent experiences and attitudes of empire itself, and how the Franco-Prussian war coloured their respective attitudes about overseas expansion. Next, you will study the outbreak, experience and failed settlement of the Great War, and then will take up the interwar dream of internationalism in the wake of man-made mass death, be it in diplomatic rapprochement, cultural exchange and political spectacles such as the 1937 World's Fair in Paris. Additional topics will include the coming of World War II and the traumatic experience of occupation, complicity and the Holocaust; the Cold War project to build a new and 'post-national' (western) Europe from the ruins of Nazism; the upheavals of 1968, with a view to investigating how and why the uprisings in Paris and West Berlin were shaped by their respective 'Vichy Syndromes'; as well as the seismic shift of 1989 and the subsequent remaking of a new Franco-German conception of Europe as a 'civilian power' to counter a brazen American unilateralism.

Historical Skills and Methods

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

This module enables you to design, execute, present and evaluate group research projects in order to develop skills used by practicing historians including archival research, critical analysis and presentation of findings. During the module you will produce a portfolio consisting of a written report on a group research project, an individual research proposal (which may form the basis of your dissertation which is written in the summer), and a short reflective essay.

The People's Century: Britain 1900-2000

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

This module explores the development of Britain across the 20th century. For the last two generations, the study of British History at Sussex has been concerned with the lives and experience of ordinary people, and this course builds upon this longstanding tradition.

Themes may include inequality, emotion, welfare, citizenship, warfare, and popular culture. You will study four themes during the module, depending on which of the four modern British social, economic and cultural historians are teaching.

Religion, Race and the Making of Modern America

30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

Religious-inflected debates have played a formative role in the tortuous progress of racial and ethnic relations in the United States since the founding of the American republic. This module will probe the origins and course of those debates, enhancing your awareness of the impact that contested religious ideas about the place of blacks in American society have had on intellectual discourses, political rhetoric, and southern/national identity.

You will focus on three critical moments of debate which elicited significant shifts in the status of ethnic minorities: contests over slavery, religion and the definition of freedom; the Civil War, Reconstruction and the development of racial segregation; and the 20th-century civil rights movement, white resistance to integration and the contested religious meanings of these disparate movements.

Topics for discussion include: abolitionism; the proslavery defence; African American and southern white religious thought in an age of evangelical growth; the religious roots of black emancipationist narratives of the Civil War; the Confederacy as a Christian nation; the development of the Lost Cause as a southern civil religion; and constructions of working-class and racial identity and the contest civil rights movement.