Bloomsbury History - Lesson Plans
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Providing inspiration to bolster courses, our lesson plans help to support teaching and individual learning using the vast array of material that is available on Bloomsbury History. With links to additional reading, discussion topics, and homework assignments, the following plans can also be seen as navigational tools to assist users make the most of the variety of content available on the site.


African Kingdoms, c.400–1500

Adam Simmons

Africa had a rich and diverse history prior to the arrival of the Portuguese. In this course students will be introduced to multiple African kingdoms located throughout the continent which prospered at the same time as the medieval period in Europe.

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Animals and History

Susan Nance

This course explores the history of human ideas about and uses of animals, and important ways of interpreting that past in order to understand the lives of historical animals from antiquity to the present.

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Animals of Medieval Europe

Sophie Page

This unit focuses on inter-species relations in late medieval Europe, a period relatively neglected in the field of animal history, but which nevertheless has important contributions to make to it.

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Approaches to History

Alessandra Cecolin

This unit asks students to consider what form of thinking and writing “history” is, the problems involved in studying and explaining the past, and the many dilemmas faced by historians in reconstructing it.

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Bodies and Medicine in the Middle Ages

Winston Black

How did people experience health and disease in the medieval world? What forms did healing take, who practiced it, and how were physicians and healers viewed by society?

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The Body and Modernity

Darren N. Wagner

This course gives students the opportunity to critically explore some of the many ways in which changes relating to the body were tied to the Enlightenment era and the emergence of modernity.

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The Byzantine Empire in the Age of the “Macedonian Dynasty” (867–1056)

Shaun Tougher

This period is distinguished by the recovery of the empire from a phase of decline and its attainment of significant political power and cultural influence in Europe and the Near East, as well as by the establishment and survival of one of its longest-lived imperial families.

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Cultural History of Climate Change

Vladimir Janković

The course aims to explore climate change as a phenomenon inextricably linked to what societies want, think, and do, and how such wants, ideas, and practices inform the contemporary climatological citizenship.

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A Cultural History of Color in Design and Marketing

Stephen Westland

This course gives students the opportunity to critically explore the nature of color and its use in twentieth-century design and marketing. The lessons will draw upon psychology, technology, cultural history, and design principles. 

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A Cultural History of Modern Italy

Alice Gussoni

Each lesson is designed to provide students with a basic knowledge of political events, which would allow them to develop their own analysis from a cultural and social perspective. 

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A Cultural History of the Sea Since 1500

Graeme J. Milne

This course explores shifting perceptions of the sea over time, as cultural meanings developed in an ongoing entanglement with scientific, technological, military, economic, and political change.

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Cultural Representations of Disability

Ella Houston

By completing this course, students will have enhanced appreciation and understanding of the role of culture in influencing societal responses to impairment and disability. 

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Domestic Cultures in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain

Joanne Hollows

The unit encourages students to analyze primary sources to understand how the meaning of home is created across a range of cultural forms and practices.

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Gender and History

Susan Kingsley Kent

This course aims to provide you with an overarching understanding of how gender history has developed over the past forty years to become a crucial aspect of the historian’s toolbox.

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Gender and Sexuality

Sarah Jones

This unit has been designed to offer students an overview of some key themes and topics in the cultural history of gender and sexuality in modern Europe—a broad, dynamic, and expanding historical field.

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Global History

Daniel Gorman

Students will learn about the ways we can study global history; how it is similar to and different from other ways of studying the past; and what we have to gain by learning about history across vast spaces and timeframes. 

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The Global History of Food

Katrina-Louise Moseley

This course offers students varied perspectives on food throughout global history and reflects some of the exciting work that scholars are now doing in the field.

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Global Medieval Heritage and Policy

Sara Ann Knutson

This course offers students a foundation for interrogating issues in context of the global medieval past and its articulations in cultural heritage work and cultural policy today. 

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Histories of Media and Everyday Life

Joanne Hollows

This unit enable students to develop more in-depth knowledge of a series of issues such as media and the senses; the media and everyday life in interwar Britain; and the media and consumer culture.

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History and Culture of the Medieval Black Sea

Teresa Shawcross, Lillian Datchev and Earnestine Qiu

Probing textual and archaeological evidence, this unit address fundamental questions regarding the nature of trans-regional networks and the role played in them by local nodes.

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History and Culture of the Medieval Mediterranean

Teresa Shawcross, Ariana Myers and Lillian Datchev

This course approaches the encounters and interactions between people who were often of different religion, but whose diversity could also be defined in terms of race or ethnicity, class, gender and ability.

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The History of Freedom in Early Modern Europe (1348–1648)

Jim Coons

This set of lessons will frame an interrogation of eight key issues—individualism, education, self-presentation, sex, gender, faith, law, and popular culture—that shaped “freedom” during the early modern era.

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The Islamic Golden Age

This course explores the political, economic, social, and cultural history of the Abbasids and their contributions to the Islamic World and beyond. It also investigates how their history lives on in our present day.

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Jews and Christians in the Western Middle Ages

Anna Rich-Abad

This unit approaches the topic of interaction between Jews and Christians in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, considering their mutual perceptions and attitudes.

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Philosophy of History

Kenneth L. Campbell

This course aims to teach students to probe the variety of ideas presented about the nature and meaning of history by authors from the medieval period to the present.

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Public History in Practice

Faye Sayer

Explore history in the public sphere and gain an overview of the methodological approaches that enable history to have wider-world application and make history accessible to a wide audience.

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Sports History

Fiona Skillen

This unit introduces students to the academic study of sport history before moving on to explore key aspects of the development of modern organized sport.

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Urban Life in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

Luca Zenobi

This course has two aims: to introduce students to the world of medieval and Renaissance Italy, and to expose them to a series of themes and debates which have challenged urban historians in recent years.

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War and Peace in the Early Modern Period

Peter Schröder

Students will be introduced to key sources and will learn to assess the competing ideas. The basic historical context will provide the necessary background knowledge for assessing these authors and their ideas. 

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Women and Gender in the Middle Ages

Bronach Kane

Focusing on themes critical to the study of women’s history, this module will introduce students to key attitudes, beliefs, and structures that shaped women’s experiences in the medieval world.

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