📖Program Curriculum
Historical Research: Methods, Sources and Approaches - HIST4021A
This course involves 12-14 seminars which will prepare students for their independent research project. Seminars will include discussions on:
Choosing a research topic
Developing research questions
Writing a literature review
Navigating archives (including field visits to key local historical archives)
The use of digital archives
Organising historical data and other practicalities and ethical considerations of research
Rural Transformation: Town & Countryside in Transition - HIST 4001A
This unit explores profound transformations in the fabric of South African society brought about by the interplay of rural and urban society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The themes considered include:
The causes and consequences of migrant labour
Changing dynamics of generation and gender
The politics and practice of resistance
Evolving forms of sexuality
Issues of racial and ethnic identity
The contestation of chieftainship
The intersection of malevolence, misfortune and witchcraft
Selected Topics/Histories of the Global South - HIST 4012A
This course charts a new post-colonial history by working against ‘nation-centered’ conceptions of historical processes. The course explores the linked histories of Africa and Asia through the connections that the two regions have shared in religion, commerce, the movements of labour and capital and not least the circulation of ideas, from about 1800 to 2000. The course questions inherited periodisations of the past that sharply divide the precolonial, colonial and post-colonial, and critique colonial and nationalist maps that have paid little attention to alternative geographies created by the movement of people.
Themes in African-American History in the United States - HIST 4014A
The unit offers an intensive examination of pivotal historical scholarship on African-American history. It focuses on recent analyses of several major themes and processes in the history of African-Americans. Some of these include:
The African slave experiences in the Middle Passage
The economics of slavery in the American South
Slave culture
Civil War and Reconstruction
The Great Migration
The Harlem Renaissance
The Civil Rights movement
Oral & Documentary History: Theory and Practice - HIST 4018A
This unit looks at contemporary trends in the theory and practice of history.
The first half deals with:
The possibility of objective truth
The boundaries between fiction and historical writing
Gender theory
The implications of post-colonial and post-modern theories for historical research and writing
The second half of the unit concentrates on the theoretical debates and practical skills of oral history.
The Environmental History of Africa - HIST 4020A
This course addresses the following themes in the environmental history of Africa:
Pre-colonial environmental history
The impact of European colonialism and its penetration into African environments and resource use
Game hunting and wildlife conservation
Nature reserves and national parks
Forests and forestry
Degradation narratives (soil erosion and conservation initiatives)
Drought and desertification
The politics of water
Environmental sustainability
Climate change in historical perspective
The Making of Urban South Africa - HIST 4013A
The unit explores the social, political and economic history of urbanisation in South Africa from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries.
Its central focus is the Witwatersrand, but it also examines parallel and especially divergent processes in Cape Town, Durban, East London, Bloemfontein, Port Elizabeth and Pretoria.
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