Creative Writers - your chance!

Are you a creative writer, or perhaps studying a creative course at the University of Derby?

The History Society are looking for new writers to get involved from September 2012 to write articles on a range of different topics. These include your own personal experiences at the University, UDSU events, or articles relating to your course.

There will be a free-lance competition where you can write an article about whatever you like with the chance to win some great prizes.

If you would like to get involved, here are some things to keep in mind:

• You don't need to be a history student, but you do need to be a member of the History Society.
• You can contribute as much or as little as you like. We only ask that you contribute once a month just to keep things exciting.
• International students are welcome to contribute too.
• All content is subject to approval and will need to keep in line with UDSU policies.
• You will be required to attend a bi-monthly informal get-together where we can discuss the content of the blog and what you would like to see happen next.

Benefits:

• You'll be able to develop your creative writing and PR skills as well as add something to your CV.
• You will be able to interact and meet a wide range of people.
• Become a part of a growing Society at the University of Derby.
• Other perks along the way.

If you would like to get involved or wish to find out more information, then you can either send our social secretary Sammie Farrell an email at udsuhistory@gmail.com stating your interest and skills, or come along to Freshers' Fair on the 25th September where one of us will be happy to answer any of your questions.

Photographers:
We are also looking for volunteer photographers who will be happy to take photos of our events throughout the year. Interested? Send your details to Sammie via email with a few samples of your work.

Thank you and we look forward to seeing you all in September!

Ghost Walk

Tickets £4

Get them online now before they become sold out

20th September 2012

27th September 2012

Design work By Jay Farrell (Embiem Design)

Embarking a new successful year

The new academic year of 2012/13 marks the History Society's 5th birthday. This year, we want to mark this occassion with some exciting plans, developing further as an active society.

We're going to be hosting loads of different events such as the pub quiz, Ghost Walks, a charity book sale/auction as well as many other fun events for you to get involved in.

Here are some plans and ideas that you can expect to see happen this year:

• As a society, we would not be able to function without our members and so we want to get you involved this year with a variety of projects. As well as the events which we are hosting, we are also going to be hosting a competition for our blog. This is a great way for the creative writers among you to boost your CV and get actively involved with your Student Union.
• We will be setting up a forum page where you can discuss with us what you would like to see happen with the society. Also any events and social functions which you would like to volunteer with, then you can get in touch with Sammie the Social Sec, who will be happy to discuss your ideas further.
• We are planning an end of year trip outside of Derby as well as host another picnic at one of our local stately homes/National Trust sites. So far, there are talks of a trip to Ireland, Leeds and Winchester. We will be asking you to vote for where you would like to go, taking cost into consideration of course.
• At our last EGM, we were asked if we would host any more talks. This is definitely being looked into, and we are also going to be putting on some workshops, focusing on debating and so on.

These are just four focus points for us this year as a committee, and as the year progresses we are going to be involving you more and more. This is not our society, it is yours so get involved as much as possible.

Important notice:
We are currently asking for our members, non-members and friends to donate any books, CDs, DVDs for our fundraising book sale and auction to raise money for Oxfam. Storage can be provided, and if you want to find out more information you can get in touch by emailing us at udsuhistory@gmail.com.

Thank you and we look forward to seeing you at the Freshers' Fair in September.

Sammie Farrell
Social Secretary

Your Committee 2012/13

Hello everyone,

Following the History Society's AGM, May 8th 2012, your new committee for the academic year 2012/13 is as follows:

President - Simon Harvey
Treasurer - Jennifer Burgum
Secretary - Elissa Rowe
Social Secretary - Sammie Farrell

There have been some amendments to our constitution, so if you would like more details then please feel free to email the society at udsuhistory@gmail.com

Thank you for supporting your society, and we look forward to another successful year with you and our new members.

The Value of Great Men

The Value of Great Men

The idea of Great Men imprinting their desires and wishes on History is one that prevails and inspires in our world. However Thomas Carlyle’s assertion that ‘The History of the World is but the Biography of Great Men’ might be overstepping the mark. There is value in studying the ‘Great Men’ of History, it is inspiring to think what one person can accomplish, and we shouldn’t play down the effect some people have had on the course of history. However we must examine the potential problems of ‘Great Men’ History;

Great Women?

The Great Women branch of history is somewhat more unknown, to put it mildly. I might bet that when asked to think of 10 Great Men of History the list would conjure up many candidates, but that of Great Women might have more difficulty. The fact that many of the ‘top ten’ lists of Great Women are particularly inconsistent, and sometimes contain women who are often wives of Great Men should tell us something of a Historical bias.

Surprisingly the Great Men approach of history marginalises women. But hopefully points to the patriarchal nature of society, or history, or both? I wonder what Amazonian historiography would have looked like? Consider also the marital status of Great Women such as Elizabeth I, the virgin queen, or Catherine the Great, who had to suffer the accusation of having sex with a horse for her greatness. Another Great Woman, Florence Nightingale, opens up the charge of having her greatness constructed around her – which brings me to my next problem...

Can we trust ‘Great Men’ ?

Many Great men have been built up by others, many have taken steps to cover themselves. Churchill was keen to write his own version of history which, perhaps unsurprising to cynics, has been widely influential on Second World War Historiography. Many dictators and despots clearly controlled much of what was written about them through force. It is difficult to ascertain how much of a Great Man is mythical or reality. But on the other hand, Great Men in the spotlight often have official documents and public papers showcasing all of their actions, therefore allowing for a more objective route of inquiry. How certain people, perhaps fans of the Great Men or Great Men themselves, use this evidence is another matter.

How much agency can be ascribed to Great men?

It was Herbert Spencer who criticised the Great Man theory in his The Study of Sociology; he believed that the idea of Great Men shaping history was in principle unscientific, and that Great men are products of their society. “You must admit that the genesis of a great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown.”

How much control do men and women have over history? Anyone who has studied a Great Man has seen the limitations of imposing their will. Marx has been invoked to both criticise and champion the cause of individual actions in History; “Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted.”

The Greatness of Great Men and Women can be seen as their ability to interact with the limitations and opportunities that fall upon them. Fundamentally though, I agree with Herbert Spencer on the Great Man, that “before he can remake his society, his society must make him.”

Kit Buchanan, 01/04/2012

The Value of Marxist Theory

The Value of Marxist History

You may be surprised to learn that in a BBC online poll in 2009, Karl Marx topped the list of the millennium’s greatest thinkers (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/461545.stm). Marx remains, as Matt Perry puts in his book Marxism and History, “the best hated man of his times,” for many “his ideas are either bankrupt or immanently relevant.”Marxism is associated with criticism of capitalism, but what Marxism can also do is give us a relevant framework of how capitalism functions.

It must first be said that Marxist history need not necessarily inform Marxist or Socialist politics of revolution – although it often does. The focus here is on the Marxist conception of history, not on the politics or desires of Marxists. The key difference is that historians have used Marxist theory to view society without agreeing with Marxist politics, people may refer to themselves in this instance as (lower case m) marxist historians or marxian historians.

A fundamental idea of Marxism is that labour sets humans apart from the animal kingdom. In that we do not hunt and gather what we need but organise society into ordered sections that produce a surplus.  The term surplus means production that exceeds the needs of society – so storing excess food and materials, or the accumulation of capital. For Marx the accumulation of surplus means exploitation, this is because the wage of the labour is kept as low as possible so that the employer may make a surplus. This is part of the dynamics of capitalism, because the employer is encouraged to do this in order to be competitive. So the term exploitation refers not to excessively poor wages or situations, but to the relationship between labour and employer and is a fundamental part of society.

Exploitation is considered an ongoing struggle between those who try to exploit and those who no longer accept the exploitation. This is the infamous class struggle, which is supposed to drive, and unite, society and history. Marxist history does not say that exploitation developed with capitalism, for example it can be applied to the phenomenon called the agricultural revolution – when humans began to farm the land and produce a surplus of food. Those with the power over this surplus become the exploiters and those without power who must offer their labour for a share in this power become the exploited.

So Marxism at its most basic splits society into (at least) two sections, the dominant exploiting class, and the dominated exploited class. As History develops and becomes more complicated, the number of differing relationships and modes of production require further development into the many theories and interpretations of class that exist today. The basic premise of Marxism then, is that society is propelled by a struggle between different opposing interests, and that a key insight into these interests is through a person’s relationship to the way things are produced.

Kit Buchanan

Rule Britannia

I shall refrain- as I sit outside in 29-degree weather in Indianapolis- from rambling on in some academic Freudian slip, like this was just another mindless, ‘deadline approaching’, ‘I better actually do this’ piece of coursework. As, well that’s just dull. No, this is not remotely academic…… Per se.

I thought I’d share how ‘History’ is taught here in the comfort of our transatlantic colonial cousins. Or if you will: ‘ those republican (small ‘r’ in part), federal, gun loving colonial commoners’, (sure that’ll give Simon a few laughs).

From the go things are dramatically contrasting to the academic norms to which I am now accustomed to at Derby. Take for example; a class I find myself in Monday’s and Wednesday afternoons enabled ‘From Prohibition to Pearl Harbor- America from 1917-1945’. “Monday’s and Wednesday’s”, I hear you say? Yes. Here at IU it is the practice to have a class split over two days. Two blocks of two hours, resulting in a total of 4-hour class time (good to see my math[s] is still in check). This split - whilst a surprise at first - really does work. It allows for a greater degree of debate and the eluded ‘discussion’ in class, we often are lectured to on a Monday, and those topics are debated and discussed on a Wednesday. Whilst this discussion and debate is far from academically and historically in depth, grandiose, opulent and rollicking as it often is at Kedleston Road it is however insightful to witness just how our cousins - as gun loving and Rick Santorum loving as they are - perform compared to the folk back in Ol’ Blighty, when wielding their historical arsenal.  As this class requires on average an entire book a week, - which cannot be avoided as we are required to submit reading reflections, and our ‘tests’ are based directly to the text - in class often the historiography of a topic is lost, and replaced with analytical book review talk.  Sigh.  I fear this is the danger of ‘over emphasizing the need to study excessive text’ week - in week - out by a Professor, oh sorry; I meant ‘lecturer’ - saying that, the texts are wonderful.  We used ‘Grapes of Wrath’ as a set-text for our debate on the ‘Great Depression’, which is just an incredible, illustrious and overly glorified commentary on ‘The American Dream’.  I’ll refrain for now from trailing off in to just how oxymoronically developed that statement is in 2012….. For now.

Whilst the debate and discussion of the average History Major class is a divergence from its Monarchial governed counterpart, and whilst I personally find the system and atmosphere of debate in ‘Derbados’ to suffice greater, things aren’t all that bad. What is wonderful here in the US are Humanities Students (or ‘Liberal Art’ students here) political positions, and political expressionism. Twice now I have been branded a ‘socialist’ by fellow classmates. Simply for expressing support for entities such as universal healthcare, and state funded and governed education! Yes, the US is still so retrogressive in certain social and socioeconomic practices, but that really is another story. The political atmosphere of debates here in US in classes is due to the politicization of education. From a young, ‘Elementary School’ age kids are taught the systems of Government, the Constitution, and all 43 Presidents I have discovered. Oh, for the record there have been 44 Presidents in theory, but Grover Cleveland held the office twice before the 22^nd Amendment was added in 1951 to prevent this…… (#pubquizknowledge). Anyway, whilst discussions and debate is often lost in the midst of ‘book reviewing’, the political weight of discussion seems to be greater than what I have experienced at home. However, being here I have missed the glorified and sought after ‘Fascism’ module with everyone’s favorite Anglo- German since George I, Tom Neuhaus.  So I may be wrong when I comment that I have experienced greater political weight in discussions here in classes that what I have in Derby, I hope I am.

I look forward to returning to Her Majesty’s shores in terms of academic life - oh and being able to legally buy beer - and a number of other ‘home comforts’. Yet I shall ‘miss’ the craziness of US college life, just not the constant Tornado drills. Not to worry, I can always revoke their Independence; they’ve had it for long enough after all.

Rule Britannia.

Daniel Matthews