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← History Extension syllabus

NSWHistory Extension

Constructing History

16 dot points across 16 inquiry questions. Click any dot point for a focused answer with worked past exam questions where available.

What are the aims and purposes of history, and how have historians disagreed about what history is actually for?

How do you use a case study and the three areas of historiographical debate to answer the key questions in the HSC exam?

How did feminist and gender history challenge who and what history was about, and how did it move from recovering women to analysing gender as a category of historical analysis?

How did Herodotus and Thucydides invent the practice of history, and why do their contrasting methods still define what historians do?

How has history been constructed, recorded and presented in different times, and what methods and forms have historians used?

How do Indigenous and non-Western traditions construct and transmit the past, and how have they challenged the assumption that academic Western history is the only legitimate form?

How does the Marxist tradition explain historical change through class and material conditions, and how did history from below recover the experience of ordinary people?

Can history be objective and truthful, or is all history shaped by the historian's perspective, and how have historians answered this?

How do oral history and memory studies construct the past from living testimony, and what does it mean that memory is shaped, fallible and political rather than a neutral record?

What is the postmodern challenge to history, and how did the linguistic turn of White, Foucault and Jenkins question whether historical writing can reach the past at all?

How do public and digital history present the past to mass audiences, and how do museums, film, commemoration and the digital age change who constructs history and how?

How did Leopold von Ranke and the empiricist tradition turn history into a professional discipline, and what assumptions about evidence and objectivity did this method carry?

How did the Annales school transform what counts as historical evidence and time, and why does its idea of total history matter for the question of how history is constructed?

What were the Australian History Wars, and how do they show historiographical method, evidence and politics colliding in a public dispute over the colonial frontier?

Who counts as a historian, and how has the identity and authority of the historian changed from the ancient world to the present?

Why have approaches to history changed over time, and what forces drive shifts in how the past is written?