NSW · NESAQ&A
History ExtensionQ&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 cultures0Q&A pairs
- 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 changed3Q&A pairs
- 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 Rowbotham1Q&A pairs
- Students analyse the foundational methods of Herodotus and Thucydides and how their contrasting approaches to inquiry, evidence and narrative shaped the discipline0Q&A pairs
- Students analyse how history has been constructed, recorded and presented over time, including the methods, sources and forms historians have used0Q&A pairs
- 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 model3Q&A pairs
- Students analyse Marxist historiography, its materialist theory of change and class conflict, and the British history from below of Thompson, Hobsbawm and Hill3Q&A pairs
- Students evaluate debates about objectivity, truth, bias and relativism in history, including empiricist, relativist and postmodern positions2Q&A pairs
- 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 history1Q&A pairs
- Students examine postmodernism and the linguistic turn in historiography, the arguments of Hayden White, Michel Foucault and Keith Jenkins, and the empiricist reaction against them0Q&A pairs
- 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 method2Q&A pairs
- 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 embeds0Q&A pairs
- 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 duree2Q&A pairs
- 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 history2Q&A pairs
- 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 time4Q&A pairs
- Students explain why approaches to history have changed over time, including the influence of context, ideology, new evidence and intellectual movements3Q&A pairs
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 investigation2Q&A pairs
- Students select an area of changing historical interpretation and frame a focus question that enables an individual historiographical investigation1Q&A pairs
- Students plan, research and present the History Project, comprising the historical process elements and a sustained essay responding to the focus question3Q&A pairs