Quick questions on Marxist history for HSC History Extension

The most influential and least dogmatic Marxist history was written by a group of mid-twentieth-century British historians. E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963) set out to rescue the poor, the artisan and the weaver from what he called the enormous condescension of posterity, insisting that the working class made itself through its own experience and agency rather than being a mere product of economic forces. This is history from below, the recovery of the experience of ordinary, often illiterate people who left few records, using sources such as court records, pamphlets, songs and trial transcripts.

What makes Marxist history important for Constructing History is that its theory determines its method. Because it holds that class and material conditions drive change, it looks for evidence of economic structure, labour and popular experience that political historians ignored. Because it values the agency of ordinary people, it treats a weaver's diary or a riot as serious historical evidence. The theory is also a politics, which is both its strength, a clear explanatory framework and a commitment to the marginalised, and its vulnerability, the charge that it forces the evidence to fit a predetermined story of class struggle.

Use Marxist history to show that a theory of change is also a rule for selecting evidence and assigning significance. Set Thompson's history from below against Ranke's history of states to dramatise how the unit of analysis, class rather than the individual statesman, changes everything that follows. Acknowledge the determinism charge, but credit the school with permanently widening the cast of history. That balance of theory, method and critique is what the dot point rewards.

A top-band answer states that the same theory-driven selectivity that recovers marginalised voices is also the basis of the determinism critique; naming both sides in one sentence signals higher-order judgement.

Setting Thompson's class-based history from below against Ranke's state-centred empiricism, or against feminist history's parallel recovery of women's experience, shows examiners you understand the debate, not just one side of it.

"Thompson wrote about the working class" is vague; "Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963)" is precise and markable.