Hi, I was just wondering in terms of the HSC and part 1 of the exam "What Is History" I am unsure how to structure my response as our school taught us to answer it in terms of the the context, purpose, methodology and construction of each historian (each a paragraph) but when browsing for hsc help I've seen structuring based on "is history a science or literature" or "can history ever be unbiased" and confused of whether that's what HSC markers are expecting and unsure how to do that with historians;Ranke, Gibbon, C.Hill, Bede and maybe Windshuttle/Reynolds?
Thank you!
Hey there,
Welcome to the forums!
You should be structuring your essays thematically. This is to show the markers that you are directly engaging with the source (if this was Question 2, then it would be a different story). Your historians come in as examples to support your idea.
Let's take the 2018 source as an example:
Spoiler
History is a scholarly, not a political, activity, and while, as citizens, we certainly should act upon our political views, in writing history we have an absolute obligation to try to exclude them. Most historians, like most scientists, are motivated by the urge to find out. Much nonsense is talked about historians inevitably being ‘subjective’; the real point is that, being mere human beings, they are ‘fallible’*, and subject to many kinds of career and social pressures, or indeed common incompetence. Historians do disagree with each other in their interpretations, as do scientists. But history deals with human values, in a way the sciences do not, so there is more scope for differences in evaluation. Historical evidence is fragmentary, intractable**, and imperfect. Individual books and articles may clash with each other; there will always be areas where uncertainty persists, but steadily agreed knowledge emerges in the form of works of synthesis and high-quality textbooks. History, like the sciences, is a co-operative enterprise. Some historians today still seem to perceive historians (usually themselves) as great literary and media figures, as individual intellectual and moral giants giving leadership to ordinary readers. Such historians . . . tend to glory in their own subjectivity. By all means enjoy their literary flourishes, but always remember that the aims of a work of history are very different from those of a work of literature.
. . . It is fun, and it is becoming fashionable, for historians to work with novels, films, paintings, and even music. Doing this is not evidence of some superior virtue, or sensibility; in fact, most of what we know about most periods in the past will continue to come from the more conventional sources. Historians have had a habit of quoting odd lines from novels, as if these, in themselves, somehow provided some extra illumination. Worse, historians refer to characters in novels (or even films) as if they were real people. If cultural artefacts are to be used at all in serious historical writing (and I believe they should – they can be invaluable for attitudes, values, and quality of cultural life), they have to be used seriously. If one is going to refer to a novel or a film, one must provide the essential contextual information about the artefact, and its production and reception, to make the reference a genuine contribution to knowledge . . . When the temptation comes to make use of some cultural artefact the crucial questions to ask are ‘Does it tell us anything we didn’t know already?’, and, more probingly, ‘Does it tell us anything we couldn’t discover more readily from another source?’
. . . All human activities, including history, are culturally (or socially, the meanings in this instance are the same) influenced, but history is not ‘culturally constructed’ or ‘culturally determined’. Too many naïve statements have been made along the lines of ‘each age rewrites its history’. History is not a formation dance in which everybody in one period marches in one direction, and then, in the next, marches off in a different direction. What has happened in the history of historical writing is that the scope, and the sophistication, of history have steadily extended . . . In fact, no one type of history is . . . better than another: provided the fundamental, but ever-expanding methodologies are adhered to, it all depends upon which topics and questions are being addressed . . . At its very core history must be a scholarly discipline, based on thorough analysis of the evidence . . .
Here are the ideas I formed after reading the source:
- Politics play an important role in the construction of history (so I disagreed with the source)
- The democratisation of history has allowed the acceptance of unconventional forms of evidence (again, disagreed with the source)
- While history is based on analysing sources, it is important for historians to acknowledge the subjective nature of evidence as the post-modernist movement has introduced ideas in regards to linguistic turn
These points will be turned into topic sentences since I'll be discussing these ideas in my essay. The historians come in to back up my point. For example, I can talk about the increase of technology as a form of democratising history (e.g. State Library, family history). Or I can throw in Ranke to validate the source's idea on how history is essentially rigorous source analysis, but then contrast that with Hayden White, who argues that because history can be categorised into genres, the language itself can limit the historian from finding the truth.
Notice how I'm using the source to structure my ideas - that's what the HSC markers want you to do! In fact, sometimes I would quote the source in the first sentence of my paragraph to really emphasise that I'm engaging with the source. As a result, I'd recommend avoiding to structure your essay chronologically (i.e. one paragraph on Herodotus, one paragraph on Thucydides, another paragraph on Ranke etc.), but also avoiding to walk in with a prepared structure because your essays should be based on the source.
Hope this helps!
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