Constructing History

An answer to the 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.

A practical answer to 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.

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.

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.

An answer to the 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.

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.

A deep dive into Marxist historiography, from the materialist conception of history and class conflict to the British history from below of E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill. How a theory of change shaped both what historians explained and whose experience they chose to recover.

An answer to one of the three core areas of historiographical debate, whether history can be objective and true. How to set the empiricist position of Ranke, Elton and Evans against the relativist and present-minded view of Carr and Becker and the postmodern challenge of Hayden White and Foucault, and to argue a defensible position.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An answer to the 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.

An answer to the 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.