Rural and Environmental History Group

Open History Courses of the Rural and Environmental History Group

We offer open history courses of 1, 3, 4, and 6 credits. They have no fixed themes. The content will be established by the lecturer and the individual student. Usually, students will write a paper based on literature. The size of the paper and the number of books and/or articles you have to read depend on the number of credits. You can choose our free subjects without having followed one of our courses.

Open history courses can be used in different ways:

  • you may extend one of our courses. Suppose you have followed the course Environmental history. Then you can write a paper on specific themes within environmental history like the role of energy with regard to economic development, or the development of the environmental movement in different countries;
  • you may extend a course of your major. Suppose you study contemporary practices in cooperatives in Eastern Europe, then it may be interesting to make a comparison with cooperatives in the past. In general you can use a free subject to give a historical background to courses from your major.
  • you may choose for a free subject because the theme that you want to study is not covered by our courses
  • you may choose for a free subject because you can extend it on more education periods of Wageningen Universtiy

Students followed open history courses on the study of cultural heritage; economic policy after 1945, state formation in Poland and Russia; on the book by David Landes: Why are some countries so rich and some so poor; on the books by Jarry Diamond: Guns, germs and steel, and Collapse; on a comparison of the books by Chris van Esterik on Lienden en Geert Mak on Jorwerd; on a comparison of the books by Bryson: A short history of nearly everything with Boorstin The discovers; on the growth of the information society, etc.