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

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.

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.