This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
This module will explore the way in which different academic disciplines have dealt with the three main overarching experiences of the Great War – mobilisation, attrition and endurance and remobilisation. Each week students will be exposed to the differing interpretations and will explore the major differences between them. The agreed historical facts are therefore the starting point; the harnessing and meanings is the terminus. The module convenor will be present in all sessions chairing them and facilitating the dialogue with the contributing academics. Where possible it is expected that each seminar will have multiple academic contributors. Each section will consist of a tripartite format – week one sets up the following week in special collections with the final week being reflections on what was examined in special collections and interpreted according to the approaches of different academic disciplines.
The module will be assessed by 100% coursework.
Effective learning will be tested through the production of reports/source analyses and presentations. Reports/source analyses reveal a student's ability to marshal different sources of material, integrate them into sustained, overarching, sophisticated interpretations and communicate them in clear 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 25% of the final mark (20% presentation, 5% written record. The record should be no more than 1000 words)*. 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.
• Reports/Source analyses: Three reports of 2000 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 reports will be worth 25% of the final mark.
*Marking to be based on combination of School of History and Drama presentation criteria.
• G. Braybon. (2003) Evidence, History and the Great War: historians and the impact of 1914-1918. Oxford and New York: Berg
• Prost & J. Winter. (2005) The Great War in History: debates and controversies, 1914 to the present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Roshwald & R. Stites (eds.). (1999) European Culture in the Great War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• V.B. Sherry (ed.). Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• T. Tate. (1998) Modernism, History and the First World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
As a consequence of taking this module students will have gained:
11.1 An enhanced and sophisticated understanding of the military, cultural, political and social history of the First World War.
11.2 An understanding of advanced concepts in historiography and cultural theory.
11.3 An enhanced capability to understand theoretical issues regarding Historical study and cultural study.
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