§-History Extension Q&A
NSW · NESA← History Extension
History Extension Q&A by dot point
A short Q&A bank for every NSW History Extension syllabus dot point. Each question and answer is drawn directly from our worked dot-point page, so you can scan key concepts before opening the long-form answer.
Constructing History
Students investigate the aims and purposes of history and how these have been understood differently by historians across time and cultures
Students apply the key questions and three areas of historiographical debate to a chosen case study to analyse how and why interpretations of a historical issue have changed
Students examine feminist and gender history, its recovery of women's experience and its development of gender as a category of analysis in the work of Scott, Davis and Rowbotham
Students analyse the foundational methods of Herodotus and Thucydides and how their contrasting approaches to inquiry, evidence and narrative shaped the discipline
Students analyse how history has been constructed, recorded and presented over time, including the methods, sources and forms historians have used
Students examine Indigenous and non-Western ways of constructing history, oral and ancestral traditions, deep time, and the challenge they pose to the Western documentary model
Students analyse Marxist historiography, its materialist theory of change and class conflict, and the British history from below of Thompson, Hobsbawm and Hill
Students evaluate debates about objectivity, truth, bias and relativism in history, including empiricist, relativist and postmodern positions
Students examine oral history and memory studies, their methods of testimony and interview, and the debates about reliability, collective memory and the relationship between memory and history
Students examine postmodernism and the linguistic turn in historiography, the arguments of Hayden White, Michel Foucault and Keith Jenkins, and the empiricist reaction against them
Students examine public and digital history, the presentation of the past through museums, memorials, film and digital media, and the way new forms reshape authority, access and method
Students analyse the empiricist or scientific model of history founded by Ranke, its method of archival source criticism, and the claims about objectivity and truth that it embeds
Students examine the Annales school, its founders Bloch and Febvre and its leading figure Braudel, and its concepts of total history, mentalities and the longue duree
Students examine the Australian History Wars as a case of contested historiography, the dispute between Reynolds, Ryan and Windschuttle over frontier violence, and the politics of national history
Students examine who historians are, the contexts in which they have worked, and how the identity, authority and purpose of the historian have changed over time
Students explain why approaches to history have changed over time, including the influence of context, ideology, new evidence and intellectual movements
The History Project
Students compile the annotated bibliography and process log of the History Project, documenting and evaluating sources historiographically and recording the development of the investigation
Students select an area of changing historical interpretation and frame a focus question that enables an individual historiographical investigation
Students plan, research and present the History Project, comprising the historical process elements and a sustained essay responding to the focus question