Why approaches to history change for HSC History Extension
“Students explain why approaches to history have changed over time, including the influence of context, ideology, new evidence and intellectual movements”
Approaches to history change for identifiable reasons: the historian's political and social context (nationalism producing Whig history, the World Wars and decolonisation producing structural and postcolonial history), shifting ideologies and intellectual movements (positivism behind Ranke and Acton, Marxism behind Hobsbawm and Thompson, the Annales, and the cultural turn behind Foucault and Hayden White), new evidence and methods (archives, statistics, oral testimony, digital data), and the discipline's own internal debates (Butterfield, Elton, Windschuttle, and the Carr versus Elton exchange). Historiographical change is caused, not random.
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Imagine a group project that gets rewritten every few years by a new set of students, and each new group thinks the last group got it wrong. Sometimes they rewrite it because something big happened in their own lives that made the old version feel out of touch (context). Sometimes it is because a new teacher taught them a completely different way of thinking about the topic (ideology or intellectual movement). Sometimes someone finds an old box of documents nobody had read before, which changes what can even be said (new evidence). And sometimes one student just publicly disagrees with the last write-up and forces everyone to defend or change their approach (internal debate). History works the same way at a much larger scale. After the horrors of the twentieth century, historians stopped trusting a simple, upbeat story of progress and started asking harder questions about power, structure and the ordinary people the old story had left out. New tools, from parish registers to recorded interviews to computers, let historians ask questions earlier generations physically could not answer. And historians keep arguing with each other, Carr against Elton, Butterfield against the "Whig" story, which forces the whole field to keep re-justifying its methods. Approaches to history do not drift by accident, they change because something, someone or some new piece of evidence forces them to.
What this dot point is asking
This dot point answers the NESA key question of why approaches to history have changed over time. It is not enough to list schools of historiography in sequence; you must explain the forces that drove the field from one approach to another. The dot point asks you to argue that historiographical change is caused, by political and social upheaval, by ideology, by the discovery of new evidence and methods, and by wider intellectual movements that reshape what counts as knowledge. A strong response treats the history of history as itself a subject for causal analysis, showing that historians revise the past partly because the present in which they write has changed.
The answer
The most powerful driver of change is the historian's own context. Historians write from within a society, and when that society is convulsed, its history is rewritten. The rise of nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe produced national histories celebrating the people and the state, of which Macaulay's Whig narrative is the type. The catastrophes of the twentieth century, two world wars, the Holocaust, decolonisation, shattered confidence in progress and in the centrality of Europe, and historians responded by writing histories of violence, of empire and of the marginalised. Marc Bloch, the founder of the Annales, was himself shot by the Gestapo as a resistance fighter; his insistence on a deeper, structural history grew partly from disillusion with a politics-only history that had failed to explain catastrophe. Context, in short, sets the questions historians find urgent.
Ideology and intellectual movements
Approaches change as the dominant frameworks of thought change. Nineteenth-century positivism, the faith that history could become a science by accumulating verified facts, shaped Ranke's archival method and Lord Acton's confidence that a definitive, impartial history was attainable. Marxism reframed history as the science of class struggle and modes of production, redirecting attention from kings to economic structures and inspiring historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson. The Annales movement, influenced by sociology and geography, replaced the history of events with the history of structures and mentalities. Later, the cultural and linguistic turn, drawing on thinkers such as Michel Foucault and the literary analysis of Hayden White, made historians attend to discourse, power and the constructed quality of their own writing. Each intellectual movement supplied a new set of questions and a new standard for a good explanation.
The Carr versus Elton debate, between E.H. Carr's What Is History? (1961), which stressed the historian's selecting and present-shaped role, and Geoffrey Elton's The Practice of History (1967), which defended the primacy of evidence and the recovery of past intentions, is the single most cited set-piece of twentieth-century English-language historiography. Knowing both sides precisely is essential for the Extension exam.
New evidence and methods
Approaches also change when new evidence and tools become available. The opening of archives, the survival of serial records such as parish registers, and later the arrival of statistics, computers and digital databases allowed the quantitative and demographic histories that earlier historians could not have written. The recording of oral testimony made possible histories of migrants, workers and Indigenous communities whose experience the written archive had excluded. Archaeology, climate science and, more recently, genetic and data-driven methods continue to open questions and overturn older accounts. New evidence does not simply add detail; it can render an entire approach obsolete by making its silences visible.
The internal dynamics of debate
Finally, history changes through its own internal arguments. Each generation defines itself partly against its predecessors. Herbert Butterfield's attack on Whig history, Geoffrey Elton's defence of empirical political history in The Practice of History, and Keith Windschuttle's polemic against what he saw as the relativism of social and postmodern history in The Killing of History are all examples of historians driving change by contesting the dominant approach. The famous exchange between E.H. Carr, who in What Is History? stressed the historian's selecting role and present-mindedness, and Elton, who insisted on the primacy of the evidence and the recoverable intentions of past actors, is the classic set-piece showing that the discipline advances through structured disagreement.
Using this in an answer
The argument to make is causal: name the change in approach, then name its driver, context, ideology, new evidence or internal debate, and a historian who embodies it. Showing, for example, that the Annales turn to structures was driven both by intellectual borrowing from the social sciences and by disillusion with a political history that had failed to explain the World Wars, demonstrates that you can explain historiographical change rather than merely narrate it. That is exactly what the dot point and the Extension exam reward.
Worked example 1 - a short-answer response (6 marks)
Question. Explain how twentieth-century political catastrophe drove the Annales school's turn to structural history.
Model answer. The two world wars, the Holocaust and decolonisation shattered European confidence in progress and in a politics-and-great-men history that had failed to explain how such catastrophe could occur. The Annales school, led by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre and later Fernand Braudel, responded by redirecting history toward geography, climate, mentalities and the longue duree, the slow-moving structures beneath political events, arguing that a deeper, structural explanation was needed precisely because a purely political narrative had missed the causes of disaster. Bloch, himself shot by the Gestapo as a resistance fighter in 1944, embodied the link between lived catastrophe and this reorientation: his call for a history explaining deep causes, not only surface events, grew from disillusion with an approach that had failed him personally. This shows the shift to structural history was caused by a specific historical rupture, not an arbitrary change in fashion.
Marker's note: markers reward the catastrophe named with at least two specific events, the Annales response named with its founders and new subject matter, and an explicit causal statement linking the context to the new approach, not just a description of what the Annales studied.
Worked example 2 - a data/stimulus response (5 marks)
Question. An ExamExplained-composed stimulus reads: "Carr said the historian selects and shapes the past from the present; Elton replied that the evidence, not the historian's present, must set the limits of what can be claimed." Identify the two positions and explain what the debate changed.
Model answer. E.H. Carr, in What Is History? (1961), argued the historian inevitably selects and interprets the past through present-day concerns, meaning objectivity is always partial and shaped by the historian's own moment. Geoffrey Elton, in The Practice of History (1967), replied that the historian's task is instead to recover the past's own intentions, letting the surviving evidence, not present-day concerns, discipline what can legitimately be claimed. The debate changed acceptable method by forcing historians to hold both positions together afterwards: after Carr, naive claims to pure objectivity became untenable, but Elton's defence kept rigorous, evidence-based method central, so post-debate historical practice had to acknowledge the historian's inescapable perspective while still disciplining claims against the evidence.
Marker's note: about 3 marks for naming both positions accurately with texts and years, about 2 marks for an explicit statement of the resulting change in method. Naming the debate without saying what changed caps the mark at 3.
Worked example 3 - an extended-response paragraph (evaluate)
Question (paragraph only). Evaluate the extent to which historiographical debate itself is a driver of change in approaches to history. Write one body paragraph using the Carr versus Elton exchange.
Model paragraph. The clearest evidence that historiographical debate itself drives change, not merely reflects it, is the exchange between E.H. Carr and Geoffrey Elton. In What Is History? (1961), Carr argued the historian inevitably selects and shapes the past according to present-day concerns, challenging the assumption that history could ever be a neutral accumulation of fact. Elton's response in The Practice of History (1967) defended the primacy of evidence and the recoverable intentions of past actors against what he saw as Carr's relativism, insisting the historian's task was disciplined recovery, not present-shaped construction. Their structured public disagreement forced the wider discipline to respond, subsequent historians could no longer claim naive objectivity after Carr, yet Elton's rigour kept evidence-based method central, so the exchange itself, not a change in context or new evidence, is what redefined acceptable method for a generation of historians. This shows debate can function as a primary motor of historiographical change, not merely a symptom of change already under way.
Marker's note: markers reward a thesis that treats debate as a CAUSE (not description), the exchange named with texts and years, and an explicit statement of what changed in method as a result.
A common mistake is to narrate schools of historiography in chronological order without explaining why one gave way to another, producing a timeline rather than an argument. The dot point asks specifically for explanation of change. Always pair each shift with a cause, context, ideology, new evidence or internal debate, so that you are analysing the drivers of change rather than simply listing the approaches in sequence.
- Use the causal formula every paragraph
- Name the change in approach, then name ONE driver (context, ideology, new evidence or debate) and a historian who embodies it, so each paragraph reads as an explanation, not a description.
- Match the command word to the depth needed
- "Identify/name" wants the driver category and one example; "explain" wants a mechanism linking a specific driver to a specific change, with a named historian; "evaluate/analyse" wants at least three drivers or exchanges developed together, with a judgement on which mattered most or how they interacted.
- Avoid technological or single-cause determinism
- If a question asks about ONE driver (technology, debate, new evidence), the strongest responses still qualify their judgement by noting other drivers interact with it, echoing the "to what extent" phrasing common in past HSC questions on this dot point.
- Quote the set-piece debates precisely
- Carr's What Is History? (1961) and Elton's The Practice of History (1967) are the most citable, most expected exchange; know both years and both positions exactly, since markers reward precision over a vague "historians have disagreed".
Examples in context
Example 1. The Annales school's response to catastrophe. Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre founded the Annales in 1929, and Fernand Braudel later extended its structural approach; their shift toward geography, climate and the longue duree reflected disillusion with a political-event history that had failed to explain the violence of the twentieth century, a disillusion Bloch paid for with his life as a resistance fighter in 1944.
Example 2. The Carr versus Elton exchange. Carr's What Is History? (1961) and Elton's The Practice of History (1967) staged the discipline's most cited internal debate, over whether the historian's present-day selection or the primacy of surviving evidence should govern historical method, forcing subsequent historians to justify their method against both positions.
Try this
Q1. Explain how twentieth-century political catastrophe drove a specific change in historical approach. [6 marks]
- Cue. Name the catastrophe (world wars, Holocaust, decolonisation), the Annales' structural response, Bloch's own context, and state the causal link explicitly.
Q2. Evaluate the extent to which historiographical debate itself is a driver of change in approaches to history. [8 marks]
- Cue. At least three exchanges (Butterfield v Whig history, Carr v Elton, Windschuttle v the cultural turn), each tied to a change in method, and a judgement on debate's role relative to context/evidence.
Q3. Name the four categories of drivers of historiographical change identified in this dot point. [4 marks]
- Cue. Context; ideology and intellectual movements; new evidence and methods; internal debate - with a named example under at least one.
Exam-style questions
Questions in the style of NESA exam questions on this dot point, each with a worked answer. They are written by ExamExplained unless tagged "Past paper"; the year shows the paper a question is modelled on.
2023 HSC-styleEvaluate the role of historiographical debate in approaches to the construction of history over time. Use Sources A and B and at least TWO other sources to support your argument. (Source A: Samuel De Canio interviews Niall Ferguson on counterfactual history, The Governance Podcast, 2022. Source B: Mads Mordhorst, 'From counterfactual history to counternarrative history', Management & Organizational History, 2008.)Show worked answer →
A 25 mark Section I question mapped by NESA to "Why have approaches to history changed over time" and "changing philosophies of history". The top band (21 to 25) needs a critical judgement of debate as a DRIVER of changing approaches, supported by Sources A and B plus at least TWO others.
- Argue debate as the engine of change
- Sources A and B stage a live debate: Ferguson champions counterfactual history to "unmask traditional historiography as a construction", while Mordhorst rebuts him, arguing counterfactual history "has the same problems, since they are also constructed historical narratives". Use this clash to show that historiographical debate itself pushes approaches to evolve.
- Bring in further debates over time
- Add at least TWO more sources or named exchanges: Ranke against the older moralising tradition, Carr against Elton in What Is History?, or the empiricist reaction of Evans and Windschuttle against postmodernism. Show that each debate redefined acceptable method.
- Judgement
- Conclude that approaches change largely BECAUSE historians contest one another - debate, not just new evidence or context, is a primary motor of historiographical change. Sustain this thesis throughout for the highest band.
2022 HSC-styleTo what extent has changing technology influenced approaches to history over time? Integrate Sources A and B and at least ONE other source throughout your argument. (Source A: Meg Foster, 'Online and Plugged In?: Public History and Historians in the Digital Age', Public History Review, 2014. Source B: Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Revisionist Histories, 2013.)Show worked answer →
Worth 25 marks. The 2022 mapping grid lists this under "Why have approaches to history changed over time", with "changing technology" and "changing audiences". A band 6 answer gives a critical judgement on the EXTENT of technology's influence, integrating both sources and at least one other.
Weigh the extent. Foster argues Web 2.0 lets "anyone with access to the web... contribute to understandings about the past", widening who makes history; Hughes-Warrington shows technology reshapes how history is revised, with "websites cached" and editions pulped. Use them to argue technology has substantially changed method, audience and authority.
Qualify the judgement. The strongest responses avoid technological determinism: argue that technology enables change but ideology, context and debate also drive it. Add a further source (for example the shift from oral to print history, or the printing press and Ranke's archive) to show change predates the digital.
Sustain a thesis that technology is a powerful but not sole cause: it changes the FORM and reach of history, which in turn reshapes interpretation.
Practice questions
Original practice questions graded from foundation to exam level, each with a full worked solution. Try them before revealing the solution.
foundation4 marksName the four categories of forces this dot point identifies as drivers of change in historical approaches, and give one named example under any ONE category.Show worked solution →
Four categories (3 marks, one each). (1) The historian's political and social context; (2) ideology and intellectual movements; (3) new evidence and methods; (4) the discipline's own internal debates.
Example (1 mark). Any accurate pairing, for example nationalism producing Macaulay's Whig narrative (context), or Marxism redirecting attention to class and production (ideology).
Marking spine: all four categories named accurately (3, partial credit for three), one correct named example under a stated category (1). Naming categories with no example loses the final mark.
foundation4 marksIdentify the intellectual movement behind Ranke's archival method, and state one feature of that movement.Show worked solution →
Movement (2 marks). Nineteenth-century positivism, the faith that history could become a science by systematically accumulating and verifying facts.
Feature (2 marks). Positivism held that a definitive, impartial history was attainable through rigorous method, a confidence also expressed by Lord Acton; it modelled historical method on the physical sciences' faith in verifiable, cumulative fact.
Marking spine: positivism named accurately (2), an accurate feature described, e.g. the faith in a definitive/impartial history or the scientific-method analogy (2). Confusing positivism with Marxism or the Annales loses the movement mark.
core6 marksExplain how twentieth-century political catastrophe drove the Annales school's turn to structural history.Show worked solution →
- The catastrophe (about 2 marks)
- The two world wars, the Holocaust and decolonisation shattered European confidence in progress and in a politics-and-great-men history that had failed to explain how civilisation could produce such violence.
- The Annales response (about 3 marks)
- Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, and later Fernand Braudel, redirected history toward geography, climate, mentalities and the longue duree, the slow-moving structures beneath political events, arguing that a deeper, structural explanation was needed because a purely political narrative had missed the causes of catastrophe. Bloch, himself shot by the Gestapo as a resistance fighter in 1944, embodied the link between lived catastrophe and this reorientation.
- The causal link (1 mark)
- This shows change was CAUSED: disillusion with an approach's explanatory failure in a specific historical moment produced a new approach, not an arbitrary shift in fashion.
Marking spine: the catastrophe named with at least two specific events (2), the Annales response named with a specific new subject matter and a founder (3), an explicit causal statement linking context to the new approach (1).
core6 marksExplain how new evidence and methods can render an existing historical approach obsolete, using TWO named examples.Show worked solution →
Example 1 - serial records and quantitative history (about 3 marks). The survival of serial records such as parish registers, combined with statistics and later computers, allowed demographic and quantitative histories of birth, death and marriage patterns that earlier, narrative-only political history simply could not produce, exposing the silences of an approach that had ignored ordinary demographic life.
Example 2 - oral testimony and history from below (about 3 marks). The systematic recording of oral testimony made possible histories of migrants, workers and Indigenous communities whose experience the written archive had largely excluded, showing that a purely document-based (archival) approach had structurally silenced entire groups until the method itself changed.
Marking spine: two distinct evidence/method examples, each with a mechanism explaining what the new evidence/method made possible and what earlier silence it exposed (3 marks each). A single example, or examples with no stated mechanism, stays mid-band.
core5 marksAn ExamExplained-composed stimulus reads: 'Carr said the historian selects and shapes the past from the present; Elton replied that the evidence, not the historian's present, must set the limits of what can be claimed.' Identify the two positions in this debate and explain what the debate changed about acceptable historical method.Show worked solution →
The two positions (about 3 marks). E.H. Carr, in What Is History? (1961), argued the historian inevitably selects and interprets the past through present-day concerns, so objectivity is always partial. Geoffrey Elton, in The Practice of History (1967), insisted the historian's task is to recover the past's own intentions and let the evidence, not present concerns, discipline the account.
What it changed (about 2 marks). The debate forced the discipline to confront its own subjectivity explicitly: after Carr, historians could no longer claim naive objectivity, while Elton's defence kept evidence-based rigour central, so historical method after this exchange had to hold both the historian's inescapable perspective and a continued discipline of evidence together, rather than assuming either "pure facts" or "pure interpretation".
Marking spine: both positions named accurately with their texts/years (3), an explicit statement of the resulting change in method (2). Naming the debate without stating what it changed caps at 3.
exam8 marksEvaluate the extent to which historiographical debate itself is a driver of change in approaches to history.Show worked solution →
An 8-mark "evaluate" needs a sustained thesis on debate as a CAUSE of change, at least three named exchanges or figures, and a judgement on debate's importance relative to context, ideology and new evidence.
- Thesis
- Historiographical debate has been a significant and recurring driver of change, because each generation of historians has defined its approach partly by contesting the one before, though debate rarely operates alone, usually amplifying shifts already set in motion by context or new evidence.
- Argument 1
- Herbert Butterfield's attack on "Whig history" and Geoffrey Elton's defence of empirical political history in The Practice of History show historians explicitly arguing against a dominant approach to establish a new standard of legitimate method, not simply describing change after the fact.
- Argument 2
- The Carr versus Elton exchange, Carr's What Is History? (1961) against Elton's The Practice of History (1967), is the classic case: their structured disagreement over whether the historian's present-day selection or the primacy of evidence should govern method forced the discipline to hold both concerns together afterwards.
- Argument 3
- Keith Windschuttle's polemic in The Killing of History against what he characterised as the relativism of postmodern and social history shows debate continuing into recent decades, provoking empiricist historians to restate and defend evidence-based method against the cultural and linguistic turn associated with Michel Foucault and Hayden White.
- Judgement
- Debate is a genuine and repeated driver, not incidental colour, because each exchange forced a redefinition of acceptable method; however debate is rarely the sole cause, since it is usually triggered by, and argued out through, a prior shift in context, ideology or evidence (for example Windschuttle's polemic responding to the prior rise of the cultural turn), so debate is best understood as the mechanism through which other drivers of change are contested and resolved.
Marker's note: rewards a sustained thesis on debate as cause, at least three named exchanges spanning different eras, and a judgement that weighs debate against the other drivers rather than treating it in isolation.
exam6 marksAnalyse how changing technology has reshaped historical method and audience, drawing on at least TWO named examples.Show worked solution →
Example 1 - digital archives and public history (about 3 marks). Meg Foster's work on public history in the digital age argues that Web 2.0 platforms let far wider audiences, not only trained academics, "contribute to understandings about the past", changing both who produces history and who reads it, and pressuring professional historians to engage publicly rather than only through peer-reviewed print.
Example 2. Digital revision and instability of the record (about 3 marks). Marnie Hughes-Warrington's Revisionist Histories shows that digital publication changes how history itself is revised: "websites cached" preserve earlier versions while print editions are pulped and disappear, meaning digital method makes historiographical revision more visible and more traceable than the older print record allowed.
Marking spine: two distinct technology examples, each with a named source and a stated mechanism for how method or audience changed (3 marks each). A response that only asserts "technology changed history" with no named example or mechanism stays low-band. The strongest answers add that technology enables rather than solely causes change, since ideology, context and debate interact with it, echoing the qualification the syllabus expects for an "extent" or "analyse" judgement.