Undergraduate Course: The Historian's Toolkit (HIST08032)
Course Outline
| School | School of History, Classics and Archaeology |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 8 (Year 1 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course is the compulsory first-year course for all History students. It grounds students in key practices and habits needed for a History degree while exploring multiple ways in which historians rethink the past and its relationship to the present. |
| Course description |
The Historian's Toolkit grounds students in key intellectual and practical norms for studying History as an academic discipline - while exploring how doing History is also about testing and even challenging those norms. The course focuses on four practices or habits critical to any History degree: reading for argument; mapping out historiographical discussions; recognising and thinking critically about how historians identify, generate and exclude evidence; and exploring how historians handle silences and absences from the historical record. Students will develop and reflect on each of these practices while exploring a range of debates and issues across a few 'units'. In recent years, the issues explored in these 'units' have included: globalising the history of disease and public health; empire and rebellion in British India; gender, sexuality and protest in 1960s USA; and slavery, resistance and revolution in Haiti.
Content note: The study of History inevitably involves the study of difficult topics that we encourage students to approach in a respectful, scholarly, and sensitive manner. Nevertheless, we remain conscious that some students may wish to prepare themselves for the discussion of difficult topics. In particular, the course organiser has outlined that the following topics may be discussed in this course, whether in class or through required or recommended primary and secondary sources: racism, racial violence, enslavement, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, sexual violence. While this list indicates sensitive topics students are likely to encounter, it is not exhaustive because course organisers cannot entirely predict the directions discussions may take in tutorials or seminars, or through the wider reading that students may conduct for the course.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2025/26, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: 0 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 22,
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 10,
Feedback/Feedforward Hours 1,
Formative Assessment Hours 1,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
162 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
Coursework:
750 word Historiography assignment (30%)
2,000 word Essay (70%)
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| Feedback |
Students will receive written feedback on their coursework and will have the opportunity to discuss that feedback further with the Course Team during their published office hours or by appointment. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- develop and sustain historical arguments in a variety of literary forms, formulating appropriate questions and utilising evidence
- interrogate, read, analyse and reflect critically and contextually upon contemporary texts and other primary sources, including visual and material sources, and secondary evidence, including historical writings and the interpretations of historians
- appreciate the complexity of reconstructing the past, and the problematic and varied nature of historical evidence
- gather and deploy evidence and data to find, retrieve, sort and data to find, retrieve, sort and exchange new information
- design, research, and present a sustained and independently conceived piece of historical writing
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Hist Toolkit |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Zubin Mistry
Tel:
Email: Zubin.Mistry@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Lauren Smith
Tel:
Email: Lauren.N.Smith@ed.ac.uk |
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