This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
This module will explore how war and the threatened or actual use of armed force shaped the regional, national and transnational politics and societies of Modern Spain and Latin America. It will follow a broadly chronological theme embracing Spain's Peninsular War, Latin American Independence Wars, Spain's Carlist Wars, Latin American wars of borders and nation-building, Mexican Revolutionary and Cristero Wars, Spanish Civil War, and the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary wars of Cold War Latin America. Even though the world-wide Spanish empire collapsed in the early nineteenth century, the relationship thereafter between war and society followed remarkably similar patterns on both sides of the Spanish Atlantic.
Each week students will attend a two-hour seminar hosted by at least one of the two co-convenors of this module who will chair it and facilitate the dialogue. Each week students will be exposed to a new case-study, its agreed historical facts, and its differing interpretations, all of which will enable students to gain a comparative grasp of the similarities and differences between conflicts. Each seminar will include an assessed presentation by one or two students on a particular question or problem related to a respective case-study.
One 2-hour seminar a week.
The module will be assessed by 100% coursework.
Effective learning will be tested through an assessed seminar presentation the production of two essays. The presentations and essays reveal a student's ability to marshal different sources of material, integrate them into sustained, overarching, sophisticated interpretations and communicate them in clear diction and prose.
• Students will be expected to make regular contributions and to provide one formal presentation and submit an accompanying written plan/outline of the paper worth 20% of the final mark (15% presentation, 5% written record. The record should be no more than 1000 words)*. This component relates to 11.1-3 and 12.3 and 12.5. Oral presentations demand that a student reveal the same qualities of source analysis and the ability to deploy them in a fluent verbal argument, which is often accompanied by suitable audio/visual material.
• Essays: Two essays of 3000 words. At the end of each of the three main sections of the module students will produce a report or source analysis reflecting on the themes, approaches and materials of the section of 2000 words. Each of these essays will be worth 40% of the final mark. This component relates to 11.1-3 and 12.1-2 and 12.1-5.
*Marking to be based on combination of School of History and Drama presentation criteria.
A. Shubert and J. Alvarez Junco (2016) A New History of Modern Spain: Chronologies, Themes and Individuals. London: Bloomsbury
L. Bethell (1985) The Cambridge History of Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Vols. 3-4.
W. H. Bowen and J. E. Alvarez (eds.) (2007) A Military History of Modern Spain: From the Napoleonic era to the International War on Terror. Connecticut: Praeger.
N. Sobrevilla Perea (2011) The Caudillo of the Andes: Andrés de Santa Cruz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
M. Lawrence (2014) Spain's First Carlist War. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMilllan
B. Fallaw and T. Rugeley (eds.) (2012) Forced Marches: Soldiers and Military Caciques in Modern Mexico. Arizona: University of Arizona Press
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
The intended subject specific learning outcomes:
As a consequence of taking this module students will have gained:
1. An enhanced and sophisticated understanding of the military, cultural, political and social history of Modern Spain and Latin America.
2. An understanding of advanced concepts in historiography and new military history.
3. An enhanced capability to understand praetorian revolution and counter-revolution, insurgency and counter-insurgency, imperial, national and civil wars.
The intended generic learning outcomes:
As a consequence of taking this module all students will have:
1. Developed their mental flexibility.
2. Improved their ability to sustain concentration and aim.
3. Gained the ability to construct coherent written and oral arguments.
4. Gained the ability to research different source types.
5. Gained the ability to produce a variety of robust outputs.
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