Writing Historiography Essays in History Extension

WRITING HISTORIOGRAPHY ESSAYS IN HISTORY EXTENSION

Here is a sample question that follows the format of Section 1 in your HSC:

Section I

25 marks
Attempt Question 1
Allow about 1 hour for this section

In your answer you will be assessed on how well you: ➢ present a detailed, logical and well-structured answer to the question ➢ use relevant issues of historiography ➢ use relevant sources to support your argument

Using the Source, answer the question that follows.

Source

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|History is always an attempt to explain the sequence and connection of events, to explain why, after the events of 1789, there|
|followed the Revolutionary Wars, the execution of the King, the Jacobin dictatorship, the Terror and the Thermidorian |
|Reaction. Not why they had to follow — that is prediction in reverse, and the historian has no business with prediction—but |
|why in fact they followed. |
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|Now, the moment the historian begins to explain, he is bound to make use of general propositions of all kinds — about human |
|behaviour, about the effect of economic factors and the influence of ideas and a hundred other things; It is impossible for |
|the historian to banish such general propositions; they are smuggled in by the back door, even when he refuses to admit it. He|
|cannot begin to think or explain events without the help of the preconceptions, the assumptions, the generalization of |
|experience which he brings with him — and is bound to bring with him — to his work. When Mathiez for example began to work on |
|the history of the French Revolution, his mind was not a blank, it was full of