Quick questions on Why approaches to history change for HSC History Extension

stressed the historian's selecting role and present-mindedness, and Elton, who insisted on the primacy of the evidence and the recoverable intentions of past actors, is the classic set-piece showing that the discipline advances through structured disagreement.

Finally, history changes through its own internal arguments. Each generation defines itself partly against its predecessors. Herbert Butterfield's attack on Whig history, Geoffrey Elton's defence of empirical political history in The Practice of History, and Keith Windschuttle's polemic against what he saw as the relativism of social and postmodern history in The Killing of History are all examples of historians driving change by contesting the dominant approach. The famous exchange between E.H.

The argument to make is causal: name the change in approach, then name its driver, context, ideology, new evidence or internal debate, and a historian who embodies it. Showing, for example, that the Annales turn to structures was driven both by intellectual borrowing from the social sciences and by disillusion with a political history that had failed to explain the World Wars, demonstrates that you can explain historiographical change rather than merely narrate it. That is exactly what the dot point and the Extension exam reward.