Quick questions on The Annales school for HSC History Extension

Because the Annales asked new questions, it admitted new evidence. Parish registers, price series, harvest records, maps, climate data, wills, folk customs and material objects all became sources. Later Annales historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, whose Montaillou reconstructed a medieval village from inquisition records, and the quantitative historians of the third generation, pushed this further. The price was real: critics argued that the longue duree drained human agency from history and that mentalities risked speculation, and the school itself later turned back toward narrative and culture.

Use the Annales as your prime case of method following questions. The argument to make is that by asking about structures and mentalities rather than events and statesmen, the school redefined what counted as evidence and even relegated the political narrative that empiricism took to be history itself. Set Braudel's foam-on-the-waves against Ranke's archive to show two incompatible answers to the same key question of how history is constructed, then judge what each gains and loses.