LC History cheat sheet

Primary source: produced at the time by a participant or eyewitness; secondary source: later interpretation built from primary material. Classification depends on the question asked, not the document's age alone.

Source criticism has two stages: external criticism (authenticity, provenance, date, authorship) and internal criticism (meaning, reliability, bias, intended audience).

Reliability is not the same as accuracy: a biased source can be accurate about facts while unreliable about motive; a sympathetic source can distort through omission.

Corroboration requires at least two independent sources; documents derived from a common original (e.g., a report and the newspaper story based on it) count as one line of evidence.

Provenance chain: creator, date, place, purpose, audience, and custody history. A break in custody weakens authenticity claims.

Archive catalogue references, accession numbers, and folio numbers allow replication; footnotes are the audit trail of historical argument.

Oral history and memoir are retrospective evidence: memory decays and is reshaped by later events, so they are strongest on experience and perception, weakest on precise dates and figures.

Quantitative sources (censuses, trade returns, election results) require attention to definitions, boundary changes, and under-recording of marginal groups.

Act of Union 1800 (effective 1 January 1801) abolished the Irish Parliament and created Westminster seats: 100 Irish MPs and 28 representative peers.

Daniel O'Connell's Catholic Association (1823) used mass subscription and clerical support; Catholic Emancipation followed in 1829, but the forty-shilling freeholder franchise was raised, cutting the electorate.

Great Famine 1845-52: blight on the potato, laissez-faire relief policy, public works, and the Poor Law; roughly one million died and over a million emigrated, leaving a lasting demographic and cultural mark.

Home Rule bills: 1886 and 1893 defeated; 1912 introduced; 1914 passed but suspended for the war; the Government of Ireland Act 1920 partitioned the island into two devolved jurisdictions.

Easter Rising 1916, execution of leaders, 1918 conscription crisis, and the December 1918 election (Sinn Féin landslide) shifted nationalism from Home Rule to independence.

Anglo-Irish War 1919-21 and the Anglo-Irish Treaty (December 1921) created the Irish Free State as a dominion with an oath and a partitioned North; the Treaty split caused the Civil War 1922-23.

Northern Ireland: 1921 devolution, unionist majority rule, discrimination in housing and employment, civil rights movement 1968, internment 1971, Bloody Sunday 1972, and the Troubles until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

Weimar Republic: proportional representation without a threshold, Article 48 emergency powers, and presidential cabinets after 1930 eroded parliamentary government before 1933.

Nazi consolidation: Reichstag Fire Decree (February 1933) suspended civil liberties; Enabling Act (March 1933) allowed legislation without the Reichstag; party ban and plebiscites followed.

Stalin's USSR: Five-Year Plans from 1928, forced collectivisation, dekulakisation, the Great Terror 1936-38, and the cult of personality; power rested on party control of coercion and information.

Fascist Italy: Mussolini's March on Rome (1922), Acerbo Law (1923) and Lateran Treaty (1929); the regime was less total than Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, retaining monarchy and Church.

Appeasement: remilitarisation of the Rhineland (1936), Anschluss and Munich (1938), Prague (1939), and the Nazi-Soviet Pact (August 1939) preceded war in September 1939.

Cold War: Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan (1947), Berlin Blockade and NATO (1949), Warsaw Pact (1955), and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) as the closest approach to nuclear war.

European integration: Schuman Plan and ECSC (1951), Treaties of Rome (1957), Single European Act (1986), Maastricht (1992) creating the EU, and the euro in circulation from 2002.

Decolonisation and the UN: 1960 saw seventeen African states gain independence; the UN Charter (1945) and Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) supplied a language of self-determination.

Isolationism and intervention: Washington's Farewell Address warned against entangling alliances; the Monroe Doctrine (1823) claimed hemispheric spheres; both were invoked selectively.

US entry into the First World War (April 1917) followed unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram; the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles and League membership in 1920.

New Deal 1933-39: banking holiday, Emergency Banking Act, AAA, NIRA, Social Security Act 1935, and Wagner Act; it reshaped federal responsibility without ending the Depression.

Pearl Harbor (7 December 1941) brought the US into the Second World War; Lend-Lease (1941) had already made the US the 'arsenal of democracy'.

Containment: Kennan's Long Telegram (1946), Truman Doctrine (1947), Marshall Plan, NATO (1949), and NSC-68 (1950) framed Cold War policy; Korea 1950-53 was fought under the UN.

Civil rights: Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56), Civil Rights Act (1964), Voting Rights Act (1965); federal power was used against state segregation.

Vietnam and after: Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964), Tet Offensive (1968), Paris Accords (1973), and the War Powers Act (1973) reasserted congressional authority over war-making.

Investigation structure: define the question, identify sources, critique them, corroborate, interpret, and present a reasoned judgement that acknowledges counter-evidence.

A research question must be answerable from available evidence and narrow enough to be researched; 'Was the Famine inevitable?' is a question, 'The Famine' is a topic.

Hypothesis versus conclusion: a hypothesis is provisional and tested against sources; a conclusion states what the evidence supports and names its limits.

Selection bias: surviving records over-represent literate, official, and elite voices; absence of evidence must be explained, not treated as evidence of absence.

Perspective and objectivity: historians cannot be neutral, but they can be transparent about selection, interpretation, and the values informing their judgement.

Historiographical awareness: a case study should compare at least two interpretations (e.g., intentionalist versus structuralist on the Holocaust) and test each against evidence.

Citation practice: distinguish quotation, paraphrase, and personal inference; verify page references and archive locations before submission.

Bias is not disqualifying: identify the source's purpose and audience, then ask what the bias would distort and what it would not.

Compare sources by origin, purpose, content, and value/limitations; differences in content may reflect different vantage points rather than dishonesty.

Evaluate usefulness only against a stated purpose: a propaganda poster is poor evidence of events but strong evidence of official messaging and intended audience.

Detect anachronism: terms, borders, and institutions must be judged by contemporary meanings, not present-day categories.

Distinguish fact, inference, and opinion in any source; historians build arguments by linking evidence explicitly to claims.

Change and continuity: ask what changed, for whom, how quickly, and what persisted; periodisation is an argument, not a neutral fact.

Cause and consequence: separate long-term structural causes, medium-term conditions, and short-term triggers; avoid single-cause explanations.