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NSWHistory Extension← History Extension syllabus

Constructing History

16 dot points across 16 inquiry questions, in syllabus order. Each dot point has a focused answer, with exam-style questions and worked answers where available.

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

Students explain why approaches to history have changed over time, including the influence of context, ideology, new evidence and intellectual movements

Key question of why historical approaches change, identifying the forces that drive historiographical revolutions, political and social context, ideology, new evidence and methods, and intellectual movements such as positivism, Marxism, the Annales and postmodernism. How to argue change as caused rather than merely described.

9 min read →

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

Students investigate the aims and purposes of history and how these have been understood differently by historians across time and cultures

Key question of what history is for, surveying the competing purposes historians have claimed, from moral instruction and national identity to scientific explanation, social justice and the recovery of lost voices. How to use named historians to argue that purpose shapes practice rather than following neutrally from the evidence.

6 min read →

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

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 changed

How the Constructing History case study works, how the three areas of historiographical debate connect to the key questions, and how to deploy a case study such as the origins of a war or a frontier conflict in the HSC source-based exam. How to turn knowledge of historians into a sustained argument.

6 min read →

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?

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 Rowbotham

A deep dive into feminist and gender history, from the recovery of women hidden from history to Joan Scott's argument that gender is a category of historical analysis. How the field exposed the assumptions buried in mainstream history and changed what counts as a historical question.

6 min read →

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?

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 model

A deep dive into Indigenous and non-Western ways of constructing the past, from oral and ancestral traditions and deep time to the challenge they pose to the Western archive. How recognising these traditions reframes the key question of what counts as legitimate history and who has the authority to write it.

6 min read →

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?

Students analyse Marxist historiography, its materialist theory of change and class conflict, and the British history from below of Thompson, Hobsbawm and Hill

A deep dive into Marxist historiography, the materialist conception of history, class conflict, and the British history from below of E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill, showing how a theory of change shapes what historians explain and whose experience they recover.

9 min read →

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?

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 history

A deep dive into oral history and memory studies. How recorded testimony recovers experience that archives miss, why memory is constructed rather than a recording, and how Portelli, Halbwachs and Nora reframed errors in memory as evidence and made memory itself a subject of history.

9 min read →

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?

Students examine postmodernism and the linguistic turn in historiography, the arguments of Hayden White, Michel Foucault and Keith Jenkins, and the empiricist reaction against them

A deep dive into the postmodern challenge to history and the linguistic turn. Hayden White on narrative emplotment, Foucault on power and discourse, Keith Jenkins on history as a discourse about the past, and the fierce empiricist reaction from Evans and Windschuttle.

9 min read →

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?

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 method

A deep dive into public and digital history, the presentation of the past through museums, memorials, film and the digital age. How these forms widen the audience and the makers of history, change what counts as authority, and raise fresh problems of accuracy, access and the politics of commemoration.

6 min read →

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

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 time

First key question of Constructing History, who historians are and how their identity and authority have shifted from Herodotus and Thucydides to professional academics and public historians. How to use named figures and their contexts to argue that the historian is a constructed role, not a neutral recorder.

9 min read →

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

Students analyse how history has been constructed, recorded and presented over time, including the methods, sources and forms historians have used

Key question of how history is constructed, recorded and presented, surveying the methods and forms historians have used from oral tradition and chronicle to source criticism, quantitative and total history, and digital and public history. How to argue that form and method are never neutral but shape the history that results.

6 min read →

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?

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 duree

A deep dive into the French Annales school, from Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre to Fernand Braudel. How total history, the longue duree and the study of mentalities widened historical evidence beyond politics, and how Braudel's layered time reshaped what a history could even be about.

9 min read →

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?

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 history

A deep dive into the Australian History Wars, the public dispute over frontier violence and national memory. How Reynolds and Ryan, Windschuttle's challenge over footnotes and evidence, and the political stakes of the black armband debate make this the ideal case of historiography in action.

9 min read →

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

Students analyse the foundational methods of Herodotus and Thucydides and how their contrasting approaches to inquiry, evidence and narrative shaped the discipline

A depth study of the two ancient Greeks who founded the practice of history, Herodotus the wide-ranging inquirer and Thucydides the rigorous contemporary analyst. How to use their contrasting methods, sources and purposes as the original statement of tensions that still run through historiography, and to deploy them precisely in Constructing History answers.

6 min read →

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?

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 embeds

A deep dive into Leopold von Ranke and the empiricist tradition that made history a professional discipline. The archival method, source criticism and the slogan about showing the past as it was, plus the unspoken assumptions about objectivity that later historians from Carr to White would attack.

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

Students evaluate debates about objectivity, truth, bias and relativism in history, including empiricist, relativist and postmodern positions

How the empiricist position of Ranke, Elton and Evans, the relativist and present minded view of Carr and Becker, and the postmodern challenge of Hayden White and Foucault answer whether history can be objective and true, and how to argue a defensible position.

9 min read →