BA Art History and History / Course details

This course explores the history of Britain during the late-nineteenth and twentieth century through the prism of debates about the nature of crime and criminality, policing and regulation. By historicizing how those considered ‘deviant’ were identified and contained — from murderers to political or environmental protesters, and those tried for sexual assault and war crimes to those fighting against colonial rule or to advance civil rights — this course invites students to consider how broader social, cultural, and political processes were understood in relation to the actions of those who transgressed the ‘norm’. Additionally, it interrogates the circulation of ideas about crime: through various kinds of media (such as fiction, theatre, film, and the press); and transnationally between police forces and governments. Key themes: gender, sexuality, race, class, governance, media, urban space, the environment.

Restricted to History programmes, History joint honours programmes (please check your programme structure for further details).

• To encourage students to critically examine the ways in which historians have approached writing histories of crime and society to date and through what media.
• To enable students to identify the role of the global and transnational in shaping modes of regulation historically via new technologies of surveillance, communication and mass media.
• To challenge students to assess prevailing attitudes towards, and practices of dealing with, those defined as ‘criminal’ or ‘deviant’ through a range of secondary readings and primary sources: including legal and criminological texts, fiction and filmic accounts of detective work and daring ‘capers’, press reports, case files from the police, the Race Relations Boards, war tribunals, and other organisations.

Week 1: Jack the Ripper: the birth of the twentieth century?

Week 2: Introducing the Criminal Classes: Criminology, Social Surveys and the ‘Recidivist’

Week 3: The Ascent of the Detective? Policing from Sherlock Holmes to Z Cars

Week 4: Punishing Political Protest: Criminalising the Suffragettes

Week 5: War and crime

Week 6: Buried beneath the sands: Empire and ‘colonial villainy’

Week 7: Defining and Dealing with Discrimination? The 1968 Race Relations Act and the Murder of Stephen Lawrence.

Week 8: Technologies of urban surveillance at the Greater Manchester Police Museum

Week 9:  Who dares speak? Homosexuality, Abortion, and the Languages of Consent

Week 10: Crimes against the planet? CND, Greenpeace, and the stigmatisation of environmental protesters  

Week 11: ‘Hooligans’ or Heroes? The Hillsborough Disaster and the Criminalization of Football Supporters in Historic and Contemporary Contexts 
 

Seminar activities (various)

Lectures

Assessments (1 x case study analysis, 1x essay)

E-learning tools: Old Bailey Online archive of trials at London’s central criminal court www.oldbaileyonline.org; British Pathé newsreels www.britishpathe.com; Gale Primary Sources and the Making of Modern Law databases (both accessible through John Rylands University Library e-resources).

 

• Critically assess the relationship between crime and social, political, and cultural change in Britain during the late-nineteenth and twentieth century.
• Understand the development of new techniques of policing public and private space.
• Identify the role of the media in shaping contemporary attitudes towards crime and criminals, particularly where this has served to reinforce patterns of discrimination and exclusion of marginalized groups.
• Explain how British legal and penal systems have evolved in tandem with those of other countries, and within the British empire.Demonstrate sensitivity to, and evaluate, historic emotional responses to different types of crime.

• Students will be able to understand and critique the existing historiography on crime and policing in Britain in the nineteenth- and twentieth century.
• Students will demonstrate the ability to relate these insights to their examination of the primary sources, and students will have acquired key skills of intertextual analysis through learning to interpret both visual and written material.
• Students will critically analyse how systems of law, policing, and governance evolve over time and are shaped by prevailing social, cultural, political, economic, and technological changes/processes.

• Team work and leadership through group activities in seminars

• Project planning skills

• Essay writing: the ability to articulate a clear, sustained, and coherent argument with appropriate references to both primary and secondary sources; the alternative essay assessment option (first assessment) affords students the opportunity to write a blog post on a particular subject, enabling them to experiment with writing for audiences beyond the academy in a critical and accessible way

• Communication skills: the ability to participate in group work and seminar discussions in a sensitive and collegial manner

• Research skills: the ability to search online databases of newspapers, trials, and films (e.g. The Blue Lamp (1950), Victim (1961)) for contextual and biographical information on the events and historical actors we will study

• Empathy and sensitivity to the experiences of marginalized groups who have encountered criminalization, stigmatization and oppression;
• Ability to collaborate and work independently;
• Written and oral communication skills will be developed through group activities, discussions, and sometimes presentations.
• Students will acquire research experience through identifying useful primary and secondary literature to contextualize the topics we discuss.

Case Study Analsyis (short analysis or blog post): 40%

Essay: 60%

Oral feedback on (non-assessed) group presentation and seminar activities	Formative
Written feedback on source commentary and essay (returned electronically)	Formative and summative
Additional one-to-one feedback (during consultations and office hours)	Formative

 

Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in Twentieth Century England (London, 2011).

Anindita Ghosh, Claiming the City: Protest, Crime and Scandals in Colonial Calcutta, c. 1860-1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Christine Grandy, ‘The Empire and Human Interest: Popular Empire Films, the Colonial Villain, and the British Documentary Movement,’ Twentieth Century British History (Feb 2014).

Stuart Hall, ‘Scarman to Stephen Lawrence,’ History Workshop Journal 48 (1999), 187-197.

Shompa Lahiri, ‘Uncovering Britain’s South Asian Past: The Case of George Edalji,’ Immigrants and Minorities 17:3 (1998), 22-33.

Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle (Michigan, 2008). Frank Mort, Capital Affairs (Yale, 2012).

Frank Mort, Capital Affairs (Yale, 2012).

Matt Houlbrook, Queer London (Chicago, 2005).

Joanna Bourke, Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present Day (London, 2008).

Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight (Chicago, 1992).