Introductory description

The vast majority of people living in the past did not leave extensive archival papers, memoirs, or collections of letters, but instead appear in the historical record only fleetingly, and often without their consent. In recent years, the archival fragments of peoples’ lives have been made increasingly available due to the growing genealogy industry, which has led to the mass digitisation of primary source databases including census rolls, newspapers, and medical and immigration records. This module asks: what can, and should, historians do with these readily available fragments of past lives? How do we tell their stories?

This module explores how historians can study the lives of people in the past using these online records, with particular focus on enslaved people, people of colour, women, and working class people living in nineteenth century Britain and the United States. It emphasises the ethical questions and methodological challenges posed by our access to these sources: just because they are available at the click of a button does not mean that we know the whole story, nor that that the people detailed on our screens would want us to tell it.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Students should be aware that this module may contain discussion of racial and sexual violence.

1. Introduction: Small Histories
2. “Search People”: Birth, Marriage, Death, and the Census
3. Newsworthy: Stories in Local Newspapers
4. Patients: Medical, Hospital, and Asylum Records
5. Criminals: The Proceedings of the Old Bailey
6. Reading Week
7. Enslaved and Free: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project
8. Self-Liberating People: Fugitives from American Slavery
9. Migrants: Passengers, Crew, and Convicts
10. Conclusions: Stories Composed from Objects

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a detailed knowledge of how historians can study the lives of people in the past, and the methodological and ethical challenges of doing so.
• Communicate ideas and findings about people in the past, adapting to a range of situations, audiences and degrees of complexity.
• Generate ideas through the analysis of a body of online primary source material.
• Analyse and evaluate the contributions made by existing interdisciplinary scholarship.
• Act with limited supervision and direction within defined guidelines, accepting responsibility for achieving deadlines.

Indicative reading list

John H. Arnold, “The Historian as Inquisitor: The Ethics of interrogating subaltern voices”, Rethinking History, 2:3 (1998)
Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives (2013)
Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive (2016)
Francoise N. Hamlin, “Historians and Ethics: Finding Anne Moody”, American Historical Review (2020)
Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”, Small Axe 26 (2008)
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007)
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019)
Julia Laite, “The Emmet’s Inch: Small History in a Digital Age”, Journal of Social History 53:4 (2020)
Julia Laite, The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: A True Story of Sex, Crime and the Meaning of Justice (2021)
Jill Lepore, ‘Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography”, The Journal of American History, 88:1 (2001)
Alison Light, Common People (2014)
Tiya Miles, All that She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (2021)
Julie Myerson, Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House (2004)
Hans Renders and Haan, Binne De, Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing (Brill, 2014)
Hallie Rubenhold, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (2019)
Carolyn Steedman, “On Not Writing Biography”, New Formations 67 (2009)
Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2002)
Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (1986)
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (2007)
Emily West, “Reflections on the History and Historians of the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves: Enslaved Women and Intimate Partner Sexual Violence”, American Nineteenth Century History 19:1 (2008)
Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (1997)

Subject specific skills

see learning outcomes

Transferable skills

see learning outcomes