- Department: History
- Credit value: 20 credits
- Credit level: H
- Academic year of delivery: 2024-25
Since the end of the nineteenth century advertising has been an ever-increasing part of everyday British life. Whether on crowded hoardings, in magazines, on the street, in the home on television screens, in the cinema, for more than a century advertising has been. Advertising helps to shape not just what goods people buy, but what they aspire to, how they structure their lives and compare their existence to others’. Governments have used advertising techniques to encourage people to go to war, improve their health and to ‘Buy British’, whilst political parties have used it to get people a dream of a better Britain. This has led to advertising being known as the ‘art of persuasion’, but getting people to change their mind or their behaviours has rarely been straightforward.
This course examines the history of advertising in Britain following a period of rapid expansion after 1880. It explores the changing nature of advertising practice and techniques, and considers advertising’s relationship with major events such as the World Wars, economic depression, the arrival of new technologies, and the decline of Empire. Students will also learn the different techniques employed by historians to interrogate and analyse historical advertisements, as well as how to identify and locate additional source materials beyond the common or most famous campaigns.
Students taking this module must also take the second part in Semester 2.
Occurrence | Teaching period |
---|---|
A | Semester 1 2024-25 |
The aims of this module are:
Students who complete this module successfully will:
Students will attend a 1-hour briefing in week 1 and a 3-hour seminar in weeks 2-4, 6-8 and 10-11 of semester 1. Weeks 5 & 9 are Reading and Writing Weeks (RAW). Students prepare for and participate in eight three-hour seminars in all.
Seminar topics are subject to variation, but are likely to include the following:
Task | % of module mark |
---|---|
Essay/coursework | 100 |
None
For formative assessment, students will be given the opportunity to produce text commentaries in seminar, including a written commentary.
For the summative assessment students build a portfolio of two parts, to be submitted together:
a) Two text commentaries of 500-750 words; and
b) One 1,500-word essay which reflects on the significance of the chosen texts in light of scholarship and sources from across the module.
The commentaries comprise 50% and the essay 50% of the overall mark for this module. Summative assessments will be due in the assessment period.
Task | % of module mark |
---|---|
Essay/coursework | 100 |
Formative work will be live marked in seminar and supplemented by the tutor giving oral feedback to the whole group. All students are encouraged, if they wish, to discuss the feedback on their formative work during their tutor’s student hours. For more information, see the Statement on Feedback.
For summative assessment tasks, 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.
For semester time reading, please refer to the module VLE site. Before the course starts, we encourage you to look at the following items of preliminary reading: