British Social History

What is the role of history in imagining progress, identity, and political movements? This course begins by reading classic nineteenth-century historians From Trevelyan to E. P. Thompson, asking about the politics implicit in their choice of subject and archive. It then turns to contemporary history, asking, how have debates about race, gender, and the environment in the past thirty years shaped how we look at history? How have different tools like digital history or the analysis of culture changed what we look at or why? How is the study of history changing today?