History Reading List - I'm confused!

OK, so my place to study History at Jesus College was confirmed on Thursday and this morning a reading list arrived.

The attached letter was very brief: "Dear blahblah... enclosed is your reading list for module x and module y... look foward to seeing you in autumn". No specific instructions about the books.

Without wishing to ask a stupid question - am I expected to purchase and read all the books on the list before October? I mean, I'm willing to do it but:

1) there are 28 books on the list (I counted), some of them very long and one in a foreign language;

and

2) some are clearly very much "reference books" - something you would refer to when writing an essay or seeking specific evidence to support an argument, but not something you would read to introduce you to a topic area (although all the books are under a big heading - "Introductory Reading". Gulp!)

I'd be grateful if someone could clarify this issue for me, especially someone who's done the first year of their history course.

Oh and one more thing - under the Set Text for the French text paper (Tocqueville's L'ancien regime et la revolution) it does say "Try and get hold of this and read as much as possible before coming up". This implies that neither buying nor reading the other books on the list is necessary; but I have a suspicion that this specific instruction has only been included because this is the set text, and even more important than everything else on the list. Result: I'm even more confused :confused:

Reply 1

History_is...

Hey, OK I did the Tocqueville paper, definitely buy and read it, in the French if possible (they should have it at Blackwells to buy online) or at least in English as it is really helpful to be familier with it before you start! Also I remember Cobban and Herr as being very useful, as well as Welch's 'Tocqueville' if you want places to start on that paper as your list will be uselessly long. HOWEVER - DO NOT go out and buy everything on your reading lists!!! You will get a different list like that every single week all year, you are not expected to own them - get what you can from local libraries and when in Oxford everything will be available from college or department libraries. What other papers have you chosen? If I have done them I can suggest what would be good to read before term starts if you can get hold of it - I read a lot of my introductory reading and it was mostly irrelevant - after a year of the course I know which books specifically would be useful.

To Summarise:

Buy Tocqueville

Don't buy the rest

Use libraries

Tell me you other papers

Don't stress - hardly anybody has done any serious reading, at least that's what I found, and with one or two choice books you can save yourself a lot of time and money!

Jodie

Reply 2

dnra4ever

Fantastic, I've found another Jesus historian fresher. I also got my reading list today and am also slightly confused, particularly as my list is quite a bit shorter than yours.

Historiography:

Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire (Everyman edition) Chs 1-3, 13-15 - Gibbon

Machiavelli - Discourses (Penguin edition)

After this I am a little confused and will quote:

"Make sure you have reliable text books to which to refer for the whole period. I suggest:

S Brigden - New Worlds, Lost Worlds: the Rule of the Tudors 1485-1603 (200)

DL Smith - A History of the Modern British Isles: the Double Crown (1998)

B Coward - The Stuart Age: England 1603-1714 (2nd ed. 1994)"

Does this mean that I need all three or just one?

Finally:

"For more stimulating reading try:

K Wrightson - English Society: 1580-1680 (1982)

SG Ellis - Ireland in the Age of the Tudors (1998)

J Wormald - Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland 1470-1625 (1981)

C Marsh - Popular Religion in C16th England (1998)

P Marshall - Reformation England (2003)

R Cust and A Hughes (eds) - The English Civil War (1997)

J Miller - After the Civil Wars (2003)"

I assume this means just read a couple of books from this list, or is this a bad assumption?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Cheers!

Reply 3

History_is...

OK so you are doing British IV, I did that and my most used text book was actually none of those! (I loved The Emergence of a Nation State, A.G.R. Smith.)

I would say you do need text books for the whole period; of those three listed the Brigden and the Coward would do the job. You can get away without buying them as they are standard library-issue, but I personally like having a text book or two of my own that I can scribble in and keep in my room for reference at any point, so I would recomend buying them if possible.

Reading ANYTHING, even just one of the books, from the 'more stumulating' list would put you ahead of almost all of last years Magdalen history freshers in the first week, so reading a couple will certainly be sufficient. Understand that when you start essays, they will generally be very subject of period focussed, so the sort of stuff you will read in these books is good only for context in wich to think about your actual reading, hence you don't need to over do it.

(From those listed, I would recommend the Wrightson and Ellis as good overviews, and perhaps the Miller to cover the end of the period, though that is the only one you have mentionned that I have never used. Just to add to your confusion, everyone at Magd relied on T C Smout's Hitory of the Scottish People for anything to do with Scotland in the period and I would definitely recommend that, but perhaps it is best to stick to what your college have advised for now!)

Reply 4

heliotrope

dont read everything. read an overview and a few of the more important bits of... other stuff. basically, try and have read at least something about all of the different aspects of the paper, but dont read everything. then, you'll have a basis to do more reading for your essay. also, you'll develop the art of spinning out minimal reading into maximal essay.

Reply 5

sophisti_kate

Woo, Brigden is my tutor next year - she's completely mad. We were having a general meeting, and a plane passed over. She actually got up, went to the window and said, "Ooh, look! A plane!"....

Reply 6

King_Duncan

History_is...

Tell me you other papers

My other paper in Michaelmas is History of the British Isles VII: since 1900. Note that I did not choose it - if I'd had a choice I'd have done the Early Modern paper :p:

I don't mind really, I'm sure it'll be interesting. However, you can see I wasn't joking when I said it was long:

Political and General

P Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain, 1900-1990
TO Lloyd, Empire to Welfare State: English History 1906-1976
R McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951
KO Morgan, The People's Peace: British History 1945-1990
H Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1800
M Pugh, The Making of Modern British Politics, 1867-1939
AJP Taylor, English History, 1914-45

Social

F Bérida, A Social History of England, 1851-1990
AH Halsey, Change in British Society
A Marwick, British Society since 1945
FML Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750-1950
LA Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1880

Economic

S Glynn and A Booth, Modern Britain: An Economic and Social History
RC Floud and DM McCloskey, The Economic History of Britain since 1700
EJ Hobsbawn, Industry and Empire: An Economic History of Britain since 1750
S Pollard, The Development of the British Economy, 1914-1980
P Johnson (ed.), 20th Century Britain: Economic, Social and Cultural Change
R Middleton, The British Economy since 1945. Engaging with the Debate

International

J Young, Britain and the World in the Twentieth Century
D Reynolds, Britannia Overruled. British Policy & the World in the Twentieth Century
PJ Cain and AJ Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688-1914 and British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction, 1914-1990
WR Louis and J Brown, Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 4

I see what you mean about introductory reading being mostly irrelevent; take Cain and Hopkins, the first book is taking "introductory" to the extreme - only 14 years of the 226 it covers are actually in the period I'm studying!

Would you recommend getting a selection of the more general books in each section and reading them before arriving, then obtaining the others as and when it becomes relevent to the work I'm doing?

Thanks for the advice on Tocqueville; I've ordered a copy off Amazon.fr (they didn't have the 1967 Gallimard edition printed on the list though; hopefully it won't matter that it's a later edition - I can't imagine that the text itself would be any different).

dnra4ever

Fantastic, I've found another Jesus historian fresher.

Wow... interesting coincidence :biggrin:

Were you at the Babies Weekend in February? If so we may have met before. What's your name? (I'm Duncan - in case you hadn't guessed!)

Reply 7

History_is...

OK I haven't done this paper, was going to be taking it next year but dropped it at the last minute so had already had a look at some of the reading, I would advise picking one book from each section and really reading it, maybe make brief notes on key themes/trends (stress brief - don't even do this if you think you will remember!) but you really wont need to do any more than that, after all everyone has at least a basic contextual knowledge of modern Britain just from common sense.

I love Taylor, so he would be my first choice from political/general, but I have Hope and Glory: Britain, 1900-1990 at home now and that seems to be fairly comprehensive, if a little lengthy.

For social, I would go for Change in British Society; haven't read any of them but it sounds like it will highlight 'turning points'/key themes i already mentionned, an you may even be able to skim it depending on the layout of the book.

Economic is my weakest aspect of history and I detest it so I personally would ignore this section entirely!! However I have 20th Century Britain: Economic, Social and Cultural Change at the moment and that again looks like a good place to start as you can pick and choose sections to look over without having to read the whole text.

International my choice would be Britannia Overruled, but I have no reason for this whasoever *shrugs*.

Basically, every specific essay will require very specific knowledge which you cannot be expected to pick up before your teachign starts (else what would be the point!) All this preliminary reading is simply to give you a reference point, so that when asked to write about, say, Thatcher's economic policy, you know who Thatcher was and the broad environment within which she was working. I would say preliminary reading is even less important for this period because you probably have that broad knowledge already, however being a little keen never hurt anyone! You don't need to own any of these if you can get them from local libraries, the SSL has multiple copies of all of them (and one extra once I return all of the ones I have in September!) and you will probably find most of those listed never actually come up on essay specific reading lists anyway, which will tend to be more focussed.

The edition of Tocqueville won't matter at all. Advice; before I arrived, I read the text, and wrote a summary (in english!) of each chapter, from the French edition, but checked wherever I was unsure of my language skills against an English copy in Oxford. A short summary, of no more than half a side A4, then filed the lot, so that when I got an essay I could flick through my short and sweet notes to the relevant chapters without having to go through the text again, only returning to the book to re-read and pick out quotes in the fortnight before my exam - I got a first on the paper and it was a lot less effort than reading the text as term went along!

Reply 8

danra4ever

King_Duncan

Wow... interesting coincidence :biggrin:

Were you at the Babies Weekend in February? If so we may have met before. What's your name? (I'm Duncan - in case you hadn't guessed!)

No I couldn't make it to that (I was at a wedding). Anyway I'm Danny and I look forward to meeting you in October. It's weird, I didn't choose my British history paper either, I thought we'd all be doing the same as I didn't choose - Oh well, live and learn I suppose.

Reply 9

pinkpiggie

When I did BH VII, Clarke, McKibben and Pugh turned up regularly on my weekly reading lists, and all provide a good overview of the period. To be honest, even if you read only those three, you'll most likely find yourself streets ahead of most people!

Reply 10

King_Duncan

Right, I've begun getting some of the books on the list, helped by your suggestions, History_is... and pinkpiggie (thank you!) Now I just have to find the motivation to read them :rolleyes:

As for the papers being chosen for us... I believe Britain 1500-1700 and 1900-1990 are the only two options for Jesus Freshers, since these are the tutors' specialist areas, and they want everyone to have tutorials in College during the first term.

As far as I understand, the choice is made based on what you did for A level (thus the request they sent out regarding this in May). I did 18th century Britain (1688-1783), and since this overlaps slightly with the Early Modern Paper, and they want you to do something new, I was given the 20th Century paper.