The Annales school for HSC History Extension

Built on the Section I source-and-historiography question (printed at 25 marks; treat the analytical core as 20). Analyse asks you to show new questions remaking method, not just label the school.

A strong answer names Bloch and Febvre's revolt against Rankean political history in favour of total history, Febvre's history of mentalities, and Braudel's three layers of time (the longue duree of environment, the slow rhythms of society, and the surface foam of events). It argues that because the school asked about structures and mentalities it admitted new evidence such as parish registers, price series and climate data, and demoted the political narrative empiricism took to be history.

Markers reward tying Braudel's layers back to the key question of construction and integrating later figures such as Le Roy Ladurie.

A source-and-historiography prompt asking for a judgement on the longue duree. Evaluate requires weighing gain against loss.

A strong answer shows Braudel demoting events to foam on the deep waves of geographic and economic time, then weighs the critique that the longue duree drained agency and that mentalities risked speculation, noting the school's later turn back toward narrative and culture. Use Bloch's active interrogation of sources and Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou to show the gains in depth and breadth of evidence.

Markers reward a balanced judgement on what the reordering of time gains and loses for the practice of history.

Founders (2 marks). Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.

Year (1 mark). 1929, with the journal Annales d'histoire economique et sociale.

Marking spine: both founders named (2), the correct year and journal (1). Naming only Braudel, who joined the school's second generation, does not earn the founders mark.

Definition (3 marks). Total history is history that integrates economics, society, geography, climate and the inner mental world of ordinary people, rather than confining itself to the politics, diplomacy and great men reconstructed from state archives that dominated Rankean empiricism.

Evidence (1 mark). Any one of: parish registers, price series, harvest or climate records, wills, or material objects.

Marking spine: a definition naming at least two non-political dimensions (economy, society, geography, mentalities) (up to 3), one correctly identified new evidence type (1). A one-word answer such as "everything" without content areas caps at 1.

A 5-mark 'describe and explain' rewards (i) an accurate reading of the stacked structure, and (ii) the historiographical point it makes about weighting evidence.

Describe the diagram (about 2 marks). The diagram stacks three bands of unequal thickness and speed: the thinnest band, histoire evenementielle (events such as battles and reigns), sits at the surface and changes fastest, over years; the middle band, the conjoncture, tracks social, economic and demographic cycles such as trade and prices over decades; the thickest, slowest band, the longue duree, tracks the near-motionless relationship between humans and their environment, geography and climate over centuries.

Explain the historiographical effect (about 3 marks). By making the event layer the thinnest and fastest, Braudel visually and conceptually demotes political events to what he called foam on the waves of deeper time, the opposite weighting to Rankean empiricism, which treated political and diplomatic events reconstructed from state archives as history itself. The diagram argues that the deepest, slowest structures, not the surface events, are what most shape human life across time, redirecting historians toward economic, social and environmental evidence.

Marking spine: an accurate reading of all three bands with their relative speed/thickness (2), a clear explanation of the reversal of weighting against Ranke (3, partial credit for identifying the reversal without naming Ranke).

A 6-mark 'explain' needs the contrast stated with a mechanism and a named work, not just two labels.

Bloch's method (about 3 marks). In The Historian's Craft (published posthumously in 1949), Bloch argued that the historian must actively interrogate sources, asking questions the documents were never written to answer, rather than simply reading an archive to reconstruct 'what happened' as Ranke's method implied. In Feudal Society (1939-40), Bloch drew on law, geography and sociology alongside charters and chronicles to reconstruct the structures of medieval life, not only its political events.

Contrast with Rankean empiricism (about 3 marks). Ranke's method treated official state and diplomatic archives as capable of yielding the past 'as it actually happened' through careful, largely passive verification of documents. Bloch's method is comparative and interrogative: it brings outside disciplines to the sources and asks structural questions (about land tenure, social obligation, mentality) that a purely political archive cannot answer on its own, which is why the Annales needed to widen its evidence base beyond the state archive Ranke privileged.

Marking spine: Bloch's active, cross-disciplinary method named with a specific work (3), an explicit contrast with Rankean passive verification of state archives (3). Naming Bloch's works with no contrast to Ranke stays mid-band.

Febvre's mentalities (about 2 marks)

Febvre pioneered the reconstruction of past mental frameworks, beliefs and emotional worlds, arguing that people in earlier periods did not think as we do and that recovering that difference, not just their actions, is the historian's task; this required inference from language, religious practice and everyday custom rather than political record.

Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou (about 2 marks)

Writing a generation later, Le Roy Ladurie reconstructed the beliefs, relationships and daily life of a single medieval village in the Pyrenees almost entirely from inquisition records, a source type produced for prosecuting heresy, not for writing history, showing the Annales method of asking new questions of an unlikely archive.

Comparison (about 1 mark)

Both extend total history into the interior, mental life of ordinary people rather than elites, but Le Roy Ladurie shows the method matured into microhistory, reconstructing an entire community from one narrow source base, where Febvre worked more programmatically across broad cultural evidence.

Marking spine: both historians and works correctly characterised (up to 4), an explicit comparative point about the school's development (1).

The criticism (about 3 marks). Because the longue duree treats geography, climate and slow economic cycles as the deepest determinants of human life, critics argued it left little room for individual choice, political action or contingency; if events are mere foam on centuries-long waves, then the decisions of specific people appear to matter very little to the shape of history, undermining the sense that historical actors could meaningfully change outcomes.

The response (about 3 marks). From the 1970s, a third generation, including Le Roy Ladurie and Jacques Le Goff, turned toward mentalities, culture and microhistory (Montaillou, 1975, being the landmark example), work that restored attention to the beliefs and choices of named individuals within a village or community, and later Annales-influenced historians (such as Roger Chartier) moved further toward cultural history and the history of reading and representation, partially restoring narrative and agency without abandoning the school's interest in structures.

Marking spine: the agency critique stated with a clear mechanism (3), a named later turn or historian showing the response (3). Stating only "some historians disagreed" with no named figure or shift caps at 3.

An 8-mark 'analyse' needs a sustained argument showing HOW the school's concepts changed the historian's evidence base, with named historians, dated works and a balanced judgement, not a list of definitions.

Band 6 PLAN.

Thesis: By replacing Ranke's political archive with a programme of total history, the Annales school redefined evidence as anything that could reveal economic structure, social rhythm or mental life, though this reordering of time and evidence drew fair criticism for underweighting individual agency.

Argument 1 - the founding revolt widened the archive. Bloch and Febvre founded the Annales journal in 1929 against Rankean political history; Bloch's Feudal Society (1939-40) and his posthumous The Historian's Craft (1949) argued the historian must interrogate sources with questions they were never written to answer. Mechanism: structural questions demanded structural evidence (land records, custom) the Rankean archive did not centre.

Argument 2 - Febvre's mentalities pushed evidence into the mind. Febvre's history of mentalities reconstructed the beliefs of past societies, work extended by Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou (1975), which rebuilt a medieval village's beliefs from inquisition records. Mechanism: treating belief as a legitimate object meant sources built for other purposes (heresy trials, wills) became primary evidence.

Argument 3 - Braudel's three tiers of time formalised the reordering. In The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949), written substantially from memory while Braudel was a prisoner of war, he divided time into the longue duree of environment, the conjoncture of society, and the fast surface layer of events, "foam on the waves" of deeper time. Mechanism: thinning the event layer demoted the evidence (battles, treaties) that had defined history for Ranke, elevating demographic and price-series data instead.

Counter-weight and judgement: critics argued the longue duree drained human agency and that mentalities risked speculation beyond what sparse evidence could support; the school's own third generation (Le Roy Ladurie, Le Goff, and later Chartier) partly answered this by turning back toward narrative, culture and named individuals within structures. On balance, the reordering permanently widened what counts as historical evidence, even though its own practitioners judged the pendulum had swung too far from agency and event.

Marker's note: markers reward a sustained thesis that ANALYSES how the school's concepts changed evidence (not a summary of "what the Annales believed"); at least three distinct concepts (total history, mentalities, the longue duree) each tied to a named historian, a dated work and a mechanism; and a calibrated judgement acknowledging the agency critique and the school's later turn. A four-paragraph list of definitions with no data or mechanism cannot reach the top band.