The course develops students' understanding of past societies and of how these are studied and represented by historians.
History is a subject of broad appeal and relevance.
It can provide an appreciation of the roots of individual, group, and national identities in the past and thus help us understand the present. The programme seeks to communicate the pleasure of studying History and its importance in the modern world. Students are encouraged through the core courses and the optional ones to sample a range of time spans between 1450 and 1990 and to focus on British, European, and world contexts and events. They are also asked to work with many different approaches to the writing and telling of history, to the way in which historical analysis proceeds, and to the range of historical evidence documents, artefacts, landscape and buildings, other visual evidence like paintings and posters, and media like film, TV and newspapers. It fosters students' powers of thought and reasoning and their capacity to find and use relevant information from varied sources.