The Single Honours programme in History is designed not just to allow students to spend three years studying fascinating and controversial aspects of the past, with a view to gaining a real understanding of the roots of the modern world, and the nature of historical change, and also to equip them with all the skills needed to be historians themselves.

See the on-line prospectus for entry requirements and related courses.

Level 1: Frameworks and Foundations
The History programme at Level I is designed as a broad preparation for work at Level II and Level III that will contribute to your overall degree classification, introducing students to necessary skills, and giving them the chronological and [conceptual] framework they will need for the rest of their degree. Patterns and Periodisation provides a bird’s eye of 2000 years of British history, giving students not just a timeline into which more specialised courses can be placed, and also an insight into change and continuity, and how historians choose to cut up the past. The Historian’s Craft introduces the key skills of the historian and the major issues they face, through cases studies of Boudicca’s Revolt and Victorian Leeds. The French Revolution gives students the chance to understand one of the most important single events in modern world history and takes in everything from the role of women to revolutionary songs, while Introduction to Modern World History provides the chance to explore the nature of the contemporary world and the forces that have shaped it over the last 100 years. Courses at Level I are completed by History in Contemporary Society in which students explore how the past is used and abused in popular media such as films and museums, and Vision at Work/Professional Attachment 1, the first of the programme’s professional development modules.

Level II: Debates and Discovery
At Level II the History programme is designed to take students on from the foundational knowledges and skills developed at Level I, and give them greater opportunities to put them into practice. The Problems in History module comprises two single seminar courses: one which focuses on a controversial historical question (such European Witchcraft in the Seventeenth Century), and examines the way historians have debated it, and another which takes another significant topic and uses primary sources to examine it in depth. In Research and Discovery students study the American Civil Rights movement using resources ranges from the speeches of Martin Luther King to the memoirs of ordinary Afro-Americans, and then complete their own supervised research project chosen from a variety of structured topics. Themes in Modern World History moves on from the Level I world history course to look at some aspects of the twentieth century – in the recent past topics have included single party regimes and the causes of war – in greater detail. The Independent Study module also offers a chance for students to explore a topic of their own choosing, and write an extended study supported by one-to-one supervision, while Figuring the Past uses the dramatic shift of global population to North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to develop key skills in quantitative analysis. In addition, students undertake the second Professional Attachment module.

Level III: Independence and Investigation
By Level III students in History at Leeds Trinity University College are ready to work with considerable independence, and also to undertake work at the sort of level that academic historians themselves operate. The programme enables them to do this by focussing on a Special Subject and either a Dissertation or Report. The Special Subject is a double-module which takes a specialist topic, usually closely linked to the research interests of the member of staff involved, such as the Victorian City or Popular Culture in the Seventeenth Century, and encourages students to develop a high level of expertise in the area by extensive use of primary source material provided, and comprehensive reading of the relevant secondary literature. It’s a real chance for students to learn enough about a topic to be able to draw their own fully-researched conclusions and challenge existing interpretations. The Dissertation (another double module) and Report offer similar independence: students research a topic of their choosing with the aid of supervisory support, and write a substantial piece of original work. In addition to these modules, students also have the chance to opt to study Roots of Ideas, an introduction to a number of the most influential thinkers of the last two millennia including Plato, Machiavelli and Rousseau, Reporting Crisis, which considers the role of the press and television media in reporting modern conflicts. These include case studies such as the break up of Yugoslavia and conflict in Kosovo; ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Northern Ireland in 1972 and the end of Apartheid in South Africa, and Presenting the Past, which takes up themes introduced in History in Contemporary Society, and includes three fieldtrips to local museums.