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From 1986, the University of Aberdeen offered an undergraduate programme in Cultural History, the only British university to do so. Over the years we produced a large number of graduates in single and joint honours cultural history. There was always a number of students from less conventional background in the class and we are immensely proud in the achievements of all all our graduates in cultural history.
From 2008-9, however, it was decided to stop offering the separate programme to new first year students, but instead to offer the constituent honours courses as attractive parts of an enhanced History honours programme. The last single and joint honours Cultural, History students will graduate in 2011.
The College and School continues to promote very actively the MLitt in Cultural History, building upon a highly successful Centre for Cultural History which serves as a base for interdisciplinary seminars, conferences, research projects, and international activities. The University of Aberdeen remains a vibrant and attractive environment for undergraduates and postgraduates wishing to explore cultural history.
History is part of the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy, and the School is attractively situated at the very heart of the Old Aberdeen campus, only a minute's walk from the main University Library and within easy reach of Old Aberdeen's pubs, restaurants and shops (including a superb and very cheap secondhand bookshop). For those seeking to balance study with sport, the Department is only two minutes' walk from the King's College Pavilion and Swimming Pool.
Cultural history offers a fresh approach to the study of the past. It homes in on the attitudes and values held by different people at different periods, and how these people experienced the world they lived in. While a traditional historian might want to reconstruct a specific political or military campaign, for the cultural historian such events form a backdrop rather than the foreground. For instance, a cultural history of the 1914-18 War would be less likely to tell you why national leaders pursued particular policies, and more likely to explore the war's impact on the lives of ordinary people. It might focus on the ways in which tanks and trenches transformed people's experience of warfare, or how nineteenth-century theories of racial evolution helped make such a war seem inevitable. The range of sources used might include anything from nurses' memoirs and psychiatrists' reports to magazines and popular songs.
In cultural history, old hierarchies of what does or doesn't count as historically significant go out of the window. Looked at in the right way, almost everything has historical value and significance: history is shaped as much by the beliefs and practices of ordinary people as it is by the leaders of nation-states. There are many aspects of human experience which have a particularly strong fascination for the cultural historian. Childhood and old age; gender, sex, and marriage; storytelling and other forms of entertainment (including circuses); identity and otherness; landscape and travel; science and technology; religious practices and beliefs; ways of representing our place in the universe - the list could go on indefinitely. But cultural history is more than the sum of all these things. It isn't defined, ultimately, by its subject-matter, but by the spirit in which it approaches its subject-matter. Cultural history seeks to penetrate to the subjective element in human experience. To borrow Theodore Zeldin's phrase, it is an intimate history of humanity.
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