Course ePortfolio

None. No prior specialist knowledge of Irish history is required. Familiarity with basic concepts in nineteenth-century European or British history may be helpful but is not necessary.

Pedagogical Approach

The course uses a documentary-led, inquiry-based and evidence-centred approach to historical study. The documentary provides a chronological and conceptual introduction, after which students move into structured investigation using different categories of historical evidence.

Students are encouraged to examine the provenance, context, limitations and scale of each source rather than treating any single source as definitive. Activities emphasize comparison across official records, local evidence, demographic data, maps, contemporary representations, migration records, archaeological evidence, bioanthropology and later historical scholarship.

The course distinguishes direct evidence from scholarly interpretation, student inference and unresolved uncertainty. Students therefore move from understanding the historical narrative to asking how historical knowledge is constructed, tested and revised.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, students should be able to:

1. Explain the development of the Great Irish Famine from the years before 1845 through the early 1850s, including the roles of potato dependence, landholding, crop failure, relief, disease, displacement and migration.

2. Analyze how environmental shock interacted with social, economic and political vulnerability to produce a wider human crisis.

3. Compare the Famine across different geographical and social scales, including households, communities, Poor Law unions, regions, Ireland, Britain and the wider Atlantic world.

4. Evaluate the provenance, context, strengths and limitations of different forms of historical evidence, including documentary, statistical, cartographic, visual, archaeological and bioanthropological evidence.

5. Distinguish between direct evidence, historical interpretation, student inference and areas of uncertainty.

6. Construct an evidence-based historical argument about a contested aspect of the Great Irish Famine while identifying the evidence and reasoning on which that argument depends.

Assessment

Suggested Assessment

The course is designed to support evidence-based historical inquiry. Instructors may adapt the following assessment structure.

Source Analysis (20%)Students select one primary or contemporary source and evaluate its provenance, purpose, context, evidentiary value and limitations.

Evidence Comparison (25%)Students compare two or more different forms of evidence relating to the same historical question and identify areas of agreement, tension and uncertainty.

Focused Inquiry (25%)Students investigate a regional, social, demographic, religious, relief, migration or memory-related aspect of the Famine using evidence from the course resources.

Historical Synthesis (30%)Students construct an evidence-based response to a contested historical question, explicitly distinguishing evidence from interpretation and inference.

Other Information

Suggested Delivery

The course can be delivered as a six-module short course, with approximately one module per week, or adapted as a unit within a broader undergraduate course. Instructors may select individual modules or resources according to course objectives, teaching time and student level.