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

What this dot point is asking

This dot point addresses the NESA key question of the aims and purposes of history. It asks you to recognise that there is no single agreed answer to the question of what history is for, and that the purpose a historian adopts shapes the questions they ask, the sources they value and the kind of account they produce. The task is to survey competing purposes, from moral and political instruction to scientific explanation and social emancipation, and to argue that these purposes are not neutral by-products of the evidence but prior commitments that drive the whole enterprise. A strong response treats purpose as a lens, then shows how different lenses produce different histories of the same past.

The answer

Across cultures and centuries historians have claimed strikingly different purposes for their work, and each purpose carries its own method. The oldest and most persistent is the moral and didactic purpose: history as a teacher of lessons. Thucydides offered his account of the Peloponnesian War as a possession for all time, a guide to how power and human nature behave in crisis. The Roman historians Livy and Tacitus wrote to hold up models of virtue and warnings of decline, history as moral exemplum for the citizen and the statesman.

History as identity and nation

A second great purpose is the construction of collective identity, above all national identity. Nineteenth-century historians frequently wrote to forge or legitimise the nation. Ranke's contemporaries and successors in Germany, and figures such as Thomas Babington Macaulay in Britain with his Whig History of England, narrated the past as the triumphant rise of a people, a constitution or a civilisation. This is the purpose Herbert Butterfield criticised in The Whig Interpretation of History, where he attacked the habit of writing the past as a story leading inevitably and gloriously to the present. Naming Butterfield's critique lets you show that historians have argued not only about what history is for, but about which purposes corrupt the discipline.

History as science and explanation

A third purpose is explanatory and quasi-scientific: to discover the causes of change and, for some, general laws of human development. The Enlightenment ambition to explain rather than merely narrate runs through to Karl Marx, who treated history as the science of changing modes of production and class struggle, and to the Annales historians, who borrowed from geography, economics and sociology to explain long-run structures. Fernand Braudel's account of the Mediterranean subordinated events to the slow rhythms of geography and economy, making the purpose of history the explanation of deep structures rather than the recording of episodes.

History as emancipation and recovery

A fourth purpose, dominant in the later twentieth century, is emancipatory: to recover the experience of those whom traditional history ignored and to challenge the powerful. E.P. Thompson explicitly wrote to rescue the labouring poor from what he called the enormous condescension of posterity. Feminist historians wrote to make women visible as historical agents; postcolonial historians, influenced by Edward Said and the subaltern studies group, wrote to decentre the imperial perspective. Here the purpose of history is political and ethical: not to celebrate the nation but to question whose story has been told and whose has been silenced.

Sceptical and ironic purposes

Finally, some thinkers have questioned whether history can have any secure purpose at all. The postmodern challenge associated with Hayden White, in Metahistory, argued that historical writing is structured by literary plot forms and rhetoric, so that its purposes are as much aesthetic and ideological as scientific. Against this, Richard Evans in In Defence of History reasserted that history's purpose is the disciplined, evidence-bound reconstruction of a real past. The disagreement itself is the point: the aim of history is contested ground.

Using this in an answer

The argument to make is that purpose precedes method. A historian who aims to instruct will select exemplary individuals; one who aims to explain structures will count harvests and prices; one who aims to emancipate will hunt for the silenced voice. When you write, pair each purpose with a named historian and show how the purpose shaped the practice. That move proves that history is constructed, because its very aims are chosen, defended and attacked rather than given by the past.