Studying at York
Making socialists: oppositional cultures & radical ideas in Britain c. 1871-1900 - HIS00181M
- Department: History
- Credit value: 20 credits
- Credit level: M
- Academic year of delivery: 2024-25
Module summary
This module examines socialist thought and action in Britain in the latter half of the nineteenth century. We consider socialism’s formal manifestations – theories, organisations, and political programmes - but also look to the life of socialist ideas: the social, emotional, and spatial contexts in which these ideas were produced and propagated. How did activists, political groups, and ordinary people experience and generate socialist ideas?
Students are encouraged to think not only about revolutionary results, or discrete events, but to consider the vibrant oppositional cultures that characterised nineteenth-century Britain, and the multifarious ways and means that radical ideas took root in this period. Some of these ideas led to mass movements or the production of canonical texts, others were quieter and chiefly concerned with transformations in the local or the everyday. We will utilise a variety of methodological and conceptual frameworks to explore these socialist ideas, and to consider those radical pasts and radical lives that are harder to recover in the archive. The focus is Britain and the British Empire, but the module also takes in transnational currents and the movement of people and ideas across borders.
Module will run
| Occurrence | Teaching period |
|---|---|
| A | Semester 2 2024-25 |
Module aims
The aims of this module are to:
- Develop skills of source analysis and interpretation
- Assess a range of source material and relevant secondary works; and
- Develop students’ powers of evidence-based historical argument, both orally and in writing.
Module learning outcomes
Students who complete this module successfully will:
- Demonstrate a knowledge of a specialist historiographical literature;
- Present findings in an analytical framework derived from a specialist field;
- Solve a well-defined historiographical problem using insights drawn from secondary and, where appropriate, primary sources.
- Set out written findings using a professional scholarly apparatus.
Module content
Students will attend a 1-hour briefing in week 1. Students will then attend a 2-hour seminar in weeks 2-4, 6-8 and 10-11. Weeks 5 & 9 are Reading and Writing (RAW) weeks during which there are no seminars, and during which students research and write a formative essay, consulting with the module tutor. Students prepare for eight seminars in all.
Seminar topics are subject to variation, but are likely to include the following:
- A socialist revival?
- Spaces of activism: the pub, the club, and kitchen table
- Creating a culture: songs, symbols, and sentiment
- Exiles and émigrés in the Victorian city
- Anti-imperialism and colonial activism
- Propaganda by the deed: boycotts, bombs, and direct action
- Fellowship is life: experiments in everyday socialism
- Friendship, intimacy, and transnational networks
Indicative assessment
| Task | % of module mark |
|---|---|
| Essay/coursework | 100 |
Special assessment rules
None
Additional assessment information
Students submit a 2,000-word formative essay in week 9.
A 4,000-word summative essay will be due in the assessment period.
Indicative reassessment
| Task | % of module mark |
|---|---|
| Essay/coursework | 100 |
Module feedback
Students will typically receive written feedback on their formative essay within 10 working days of submission.
Work will be returned to students in their seminars and may be supplemented by the tutor giving some oral feedback to the whole group. All students are encouraged, if they wish, to discuss the feedback on their formative essay during their tutor’s student hours—especially during week 11, before, that is, they finalise their plans for the Summative Essay.
For more information, see the Statement on Feedback.
For the summative assessment task, students will receive their provisional mark and written feedback within 25 working days of the submission deadline. The tutor will then be available during student hours for follow-up guidance if required. For more information, see the Statement of Assessment.
Indicative reading
For reading during the module, please refer to the module VLE site. Before the course starts, we encourage you to look at the following items of preliminary reading:
- Allison, Mark A., Imagining Socialism: Aesthetics, Anti-politics, and Literature in Britain, 1817-1918, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
- Gopal, Priyamvada, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent, London: Verso, 2019.
- Bevir, Mark, The making of British socialism, Princeton University Press, 2011.