Coronation Portrait of Elizabeth I
SCHEDULE OF CLASSES (the schedule of classes contains an overview of what we'll be doing each week as well as links to the reading)
HISTORY DEPARTMENT SYLLABUS ATTACHMENT
Welcome to Tudor England!
This course will introduce you to the political, social, and cultural history of England from the Wars of the Roses to the end of the reign of Elizabeth I (1455-1603). We will be focusing on social history in this class, with a special emphasis on examining how people theorized the social order and attempted to naturalize and maintain the social hierarchy. We will also cover the interaction between economic and social movements, how order was imposed after a change of dynasty, how the Tudor monarchs used political propaganda to legitimize their rule and undermine their enemies, the unfolding of the English Reformation, English literature and culture, witch beliefs and witch trials in Early Modern England, and the role of political rebellion in shaping this period of English history.
This course carries a W credit.
COURSE FORMAT
This will be a synchronous, in-person class. Lectures and exams will be in-person. I will be recording the in-person lectures using Panopto in case you miss any lectures or need to review them, but my expectation is that we will all meet in class for lecture unless you are ill (then please stay home). If you have to miss section, you should let your TA know by email. Also, just be aware that there are sometimes glitches with Panopto recordings and that you can't rely on them as a perfect substitute for coming to class. I'll do my best to ensure that all of the recordings have good audio and clear video, but I can't always control what happens.
I will also post my Powerpoints to the course website AFTER each lecture. You can find them under the Files tab in the Powerpoints folder.
If I need to cancel class due to illness, I'll notify you through a Canvas course announcement. Please make sure you check your UW email on a regular basis, since all important class announcements will be sent to it.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
This class focuses on developing your critical thinking and argumentative writing skills. In addition to acquiring an understanding of the historical development of England during the Tudor period, you will learn to:
- Analyze primary sources for the historical evidence they provide.
- Construct persuasive, historical arguments using evidence from primary sources.
- Evaluate competing historical arguments using primary and secondary sources.
- Appreciate the distinction between the evidence found in primary sources and historians' interpretations of that evidence.
- Appreciate the role of contingency in historical events.
INSTRUCTOR CONTACT INFORMATION
Professor Urbanski (she/her)
Office: 106 Smith (my office is in the east stairwell between the 1st and 2nd floor)
Office Hours:
Email: urbanski@uw.edu
TA:
Office:
Office Hours:
Email:
- You can email us to make appointments or for quick questions, but you should come to see us during office hours or after lecture for anything that requires more than a one or two sentence response.
- Office hours are periods that we set aside specifically to meet with our students. You should come to office hours if you need help with an assignment, have questions that require a detailed response, or just want to chat about the course, medieval stuff, monsters, or cats. You can even come to office hours with a friend from class if you like.
- We check our email regularly during normal business hours (M-F between 8 am and 5 pm).
- We will reply to emails within a reasonable time-frame (within 24 hours during the week and by the afternoon of the next business day for emails received over the weekend or on holidays).
REQUIRED BOOK
Alec Ryrie, The Age of Reformation (textbook; you may use any edition)
All other required readings are PDFs embedded in the schedule of classes.
Recommended Books:
John Guy, The Tudors: A Very Short Introduction (this is a great resource if you have limited knowledge of the Tudor period)
Jules R. Benjamin, A Student's Guide to History (this is a really helpful guide to the study of history, evaluating and analyzing historical evidence, writing history papers, and taking history exams)
REQUIREMENTS
Reading:
All readings should be completed BEFORE the class for which they are assigned. You should bring the reading assigned for discussion section to class with you on Fridays.
Lectures:
You REALLY need to attend lecture if you want to do well in this course. Lectures will not just repeat material covered in the textbook, but will introduce new material that will appear on our exams. I will also be building upon information given in lecture, and you will have difficulty understanding later lectures if you miss too many of the earlier ones.
Lectures will be in-person but I will be recording them so you can review them or catch up on any you missed. They will be posted under Panopto Recordings.
I will also post my lecture Powerpoint for the day after each class meeting (under Files in the folder marked Powerpoints).
Section:
Sections are an essential part of this course – they are not optional. They are where you will discuss our primary and secondary sources, learn how to analyze those sources, and learn how to construct your own historical arguments. We will also focus on teaching students how to write a history paper in the first few weeks of section. You should come to section having done the reading for the week and prepared to contribute to discussion. You should bring the reading with you.
Your performance and assignments in section will count for 20% of your final grade: on a 4.0 scale, that is .8. That is a lot. It means that if you earn a 4.0 on every paper and exam, but earn a 0.0 in section, your final grade in the class will only be a 3.2.
* Everyone is allowed to miss one section and one weekly writing assignment without penalty.
ASSIGNMENTS
The assignments for this course are eight weekly writing assignments, two exams, and two papers.
Exams:
The midterm and final exam will focus on testing your knowledge of material from lecture and our textbook. The exams are intended to test you on information you learned IN THIS CLASS, not what you may have learned in another class, or from Wikipedia or any other website, so plan to come to lecture and do the reading if you want to do well. The midterm will cover all material up to the midterm, and the final will cover all material from the midterm to the end of the class.
Study guides for the midterm and final will be posted on the course website at least one week in advance of the exam. Exams will be taken in class.
Papers:
One of the major goals of this course is to help you improve your ability to read and analyze historical sources and to write persuasive historical essays. It is a fundamental premise of this class that writing is a means of learning; to that end, we will be writing two papers focused on analyzing primary sources that we have read for section. Paper topics, detailed instructions, and resources for help with the writing process will be posted under Assignments. Papers will be submitted through Canvas.
Weekly Writing Assignments:
Most Fridays there will be a 150-200 word writing assignment on the assigned primary source(s) for the week. These short writing assignments are intended to ensure you have done the reading, given it some thought, and are ready to discuss it in section. They are also intended to help prepare you for the papers and exams, and are a low stakes way for us to provide you with feedback on your writing.
Writing assignments will be given in class during Discussion Section on Fridays.
*Everyone is allowed to miss one weekly writing assignment without penalty.
GRADING
15% - Midterm Exam
20% - First 1500-1800 word paper
25% - Second 1500-1800 word page paper
20% - Final Exam
10% - Participation in Section
10% - Weekly Writing Assignments
You must complete both papers and both exams in order to pass this course.
Grades will be assigned as percentages on individual assignments and exams and converted to the 4.0 scale for the final course grade.
4.0 = 95-100%
3.5 = 90%
2.5 = 80%
1.5 = 70%
0.7 = 62% (lowest passing grade)
Grade Appeals: If you feel you have been graded unfairly, you should speak to your TA in person. If you still feel that your grade is unfair after speaking with your TA, you can appeal to me. I will grade the assignment and whatever grade I assign it will stand, whether it is higher or lower than the original grade. This is not a risk free option, so you'll want to be sure that you have a strong case.
LATE ASSIGNMENTS AND EXTENSIONS
All assignments are due by the stated date and time. No late work will be accepted unless an extension request is made prior to the assignment deadline. I have a “no questions asked" policy for extensions. If you are asking for an extension, I will presume you have good reasons and will grant the extension as long as it is:
- submitted to me by email (urbanski@uw.edu) before the due date/time, and
- you tell me in your email when you will turn in the work (it should be within two days at most unless there are extenuating circumstances)
If you submit frequent requests for extensions, I will reach out to see what is going on and reserve the right to grant them or not.
Any assignments that are submitted late (i.e. after the original due date/time if you have not received an extension, or after your extension expires if you have received one) will be automatically docked 10% per day (including weekends and holidays).
ACADEMIC STANDARDS AND CONDUCT
Honesty, ethical conduct, and academic integrity are expected in this course. Academic integrity includes a commitment to not engage in or tolerate acts of falsification, misrepresentation, or deception. Acts of dishonesty include cheating or copying, plagiarizing, submitting another person's work as one’s own, submitting AI generated work as one's own, using Internet sources without citation, having another student take your exam or working together with other students on your exam, tampering with the work of another student, facilitating other students’ acts of academic dishonesty, etc.
Unless I specify otherwise, all assignments and exams are to be completed by the student alone, without inappropriate assistance of any kind (including the use of AI programs like ChatGPT). In return, I promise that you will receive grades and feedback from a real human who is invested in your success. Neither I nor the TA for this course will use any form of AI to grade or comment on your work.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)
Two of the main goals of this course are to hone your critical thinking skills and your argumentative writing skills. These skills are incredibly important for getting through life. In fact, they're far more important than your ability to recall things like what year the Norman Conquest happened. Relying on AI to produce assignments for you not only deprives you of valuable opportunities to practice these skills, the technology tends to turn out papers that are lacking in specific detail and slightly off-topic. In other words, using AI deprives you of the chance to think for yourself, and it won't even get you a very good grade. It is also important to remember that text generators like ChatGPT are sometimes wrong, and that they are not familiar with our textbook or my lectures. If an AI tool gives you incorrect information and you use it on an assignment, you will be held accountable for it.
You should never use AI as a substitute for your own thought or your own writing, but there are two circumstances in which you are allowed to use AI in this class (your other professors will likely have very different policies, so do not assume that my policies will apply in your other classes).
The use of AI is allowed in this class under the following circumstances only (any other use is prohibited):
1. You may use AI to provide you with explanations of concepts or to organize your notes. I would much prefer that you ask me for clarification if you are having trouble with any of the material in this course, and I am happy to answer questions after class or during my office hours, but I recognize that some of you will want to use AI for this. However, if the AI gives you incorrect information and you use that information on an assignment or exam, you will be held accountable for it.
2. You are allowed to use tools like Grammarly or Quillbot to proofread or edit writing that you have produced yourself. Just be aware that using these tools to edit your work comes with the risk that it may change your original writing so much that it no longer reflects your original thought, so make sure you are using it for simple grammar and spelling checks, not to substantially rewrite your work.
The unauthorized use of artificial intelligence (AI) can be a form of academic misconduct at UW. Tools that use AI and large language models to generate text or images, such as ChatGPT, GPT4, Bing Chat, and "Write with AI" in Google Docs (the "help me write" feature now in beta testing in Workspace Labs), are usually prohibited by instructors in Department of History courses. Unless your instructor has expressly permitted the use of such tools, check with your instructor before using them. The unauthorized use of such tools may constitute academic misconduct and could result in serious disciplinary action.
PENALTIES FOR SUSPECTED PLAGIARISM OR UNAUTHORIZED USE OF AI
I know that most of you are honest, hard-working, and would not dream of cheating. You are the reason I love this job. However, there are always a couple of students who try to see what they can get away with. This policy is for them.
What constitutes suspected plagiarism or AI use?
Any of the following will cause us to suspect that a student has plagiarized material from another source without attribution or used an LLM such as ChatGPT to produce their assignment.
- Any assignment that does not contain citations.
- Any assignment that contains citations with page numbers that do not match the actual page numbers where the cited information is found (we WILL check).
- Any assignment with citations that refer to an edition of a text other than the one assigned for this class.
- Any assignment that contains information from a portion of a text that we did not read for this class.
- Any assignment that contains information from an outside source that is not clearly cited.
- Any assignment in which the author’s voice does match that of their previous assignments or in which the author's voice shifts dramatically.
- Any assignment that makes bizarre or off-topic claims.
- We will be using a series of scaffolded assignments for the required papers in this course. Students are required to submit a practice thesis statement and an outline prior to the paper, and the paper must be submitted as a link to a Google or Word doc where we can view the document history and track the changes that have been made to it. Plagiarism or AI use will be suspected in cases where the practice thesis statement or outline were not submitted, and/or when the document history suggests that all of the paper or chunks of the paper were copied and pasted into the document. It should be clear that your thoughts were developed over time, through the process of submitting the scaffolded assignments, and that you typed your paper over several hours or days (it usually takes about an hour to produce one page when writing a paper).
What happens if we suspect plagiarism or AI use?
Any assignment that contains suspected plagiarism or AI use will receive a 0 and I will email the student to notify them. The student will then have two options:
- Clear the 0 by meeting with me in person for an oral examination on the assignment in question within 7 calendar days of my email notification. The oral exam should take about 20 minutes; you will not be allowed to use books, notes, a computer, or phone during the exam. Your grade for the assignment will be based on your performance in the oral exam.
- Accept a 0 on the assignment. A 0 will stand in all cases where the student fails to respond to my email informing them of the suspected plagiarism or AI use within 7 calendar days, the student fails to schedule or appear for the oral exam, or the student accepts responsibility for plagiarism or AI use. Failure to respond to my email or to schedule and/or appear for the oral exam will be taken as an admission of responsibility.
Any student who accepts a 0 for plagiarism or AI use on a second assignment will fail the course and I will submit an academic conduct report to UW’s office of Community Standards and Student Conduct.
TECHNOLOGY SUPPORT
If you experience issues with Canvas, here is a basic troubleshooting guide. You can also contact help@uw.edu
RESOURCES FOR TUDOR HISTORY
http://tudortimes.co.uk/ (great resource for all things Tudor)
https://tudorhistory.org/glossaries/
Tudor Bibliography (additional print resources for Tudor England)
The Princes in The Tower (documentary with Dan Jones that provides a more sympathetic account of Richard's motives using a recently rediscovered eye-witness account of the events)
The Mystery of the Princes in the Tower (website with a good summary of the events leading to the disappearance of the princes)
A new theory about what REALLY happened to Edward V Here's a link to St. Matthew's church in Coldridge, Devon, so you can see some of the evidence for yourself. And here's a more skeptical take on the new theory.
Richard III: The King in the Car Park (documentary about the discovery of Richard III's body; available through Amazon Prime) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2677712/
Professor Kevin Schurer's lecture on the discovery of Richard's body
Tudor Monastery Farm (6 part series with archaeologist Peter Ginn and historian Ruth Goodman focusing on daily farm life; episodes are on Youtube)
ACCOMMODATIONS
If you require religious or DRS accommodations, or if there is anything I can do to support your learning style, please let me know as soon as possible.
For information on UW policies regarding Religious Accommodations, Student Conduct, Disability Resources, Academic Integrity, and Campus Safety, please visit:
https://registrar.washington.edu/staffandfaculty/syllabi-guidelines/