Unit name | Travels in Space and Time 1850-Present (Level I Special Field) |
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Unit code | HIST20097 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | I/5 |
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
Unit director | Dr. Andy Flack |
Open unit status | Not open |
Pre-requisites |
None |
Co-requisites |
HIST23008 Special Field Project |
School/department | Department of History (Historical Studies) |
Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
We come into contact with the wider world in a variety of ways; from the window offered by the television and a trip to the local museum, to expensive forays into exotic worlds. Experiencing this world demands the use of all of our senses and it evokes strong and sometimes conflicting emotions. However, only recently have historians turned their attention to both the histories of tourism and to more-than-visual ways of encountering the world. This unit engages with approaches at the heart of histories of tourism, the emotions and the senses to consider the development of travel in relation to the UK and the USA since the middle of the nineteenth century. Beginning with the Great Exhibition (1851) and the domestic cultures of imperialism that spawned it, the unit will chart a course across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Key themes will include the consumption of the world at home: in museums, exhibitions, and zoos; hunting with the gun and with the camera; adventure tourism; extreme environments: caves, mountains and underwater; space exploration; virtual travels; ecotourism; the impact of air and marine technologies on foreign travel; travel and sensory deprivation.
Unit Aims:
To empower students to engage in ethical debates around the nature of travel.
Upon successful completion of the unit, students will be able to demonstrate:
1. the ability to work with a widening range of primary sources relating to travel, the senses and emotions in British and American history
2. an understanding of historical conceptualisations of emotion and sensory experience.
3. an understanding of the development of travel across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
4. an understanding of the role of technology in crafting human engagements with the world around us.
5. the ability to engage in current ethical debates about the cultural and environmental impacts of travel.
1 x two-hour seminar weekly
1 x two-hour exam (100%) [ILOs 1-5]
Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (New York, 1990)
Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA, 1978)
C. Classen et al, A Cultural History of the Senses (London, 2014)
David Edgerton, The shock of the oId (Oxford, 2007)
John MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature (Manchester, 1988)
Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions (Oxford 2014)