Historiography and Interpretation
This domain asks why historians disagree and how interpretations change. You are assessed on identifying a school's assumptions, its evidence base and its political context - not on memorising names.
Core rules and concepts
- Ranke and empiricism: reconstruct the past 'as it actually was' from archival documents; the critique is that selection and perspective remain.
- Marxist historiography: class relations and mode of production drive change; strong on economic structure, weak on contingency.
- Annales school: Braudel's longue durée and mentalités shift attention to geography and long-run structures over events.
- Whig interpretation: reading the past as progress toward the present; Butterfield's critique targets exactly this teleology.
- Revisionism: empirical challenge to an established orthodoxy - Cobban and Furet against the Marxist reading of 1789.
- Postcolonial and gender history: Said's Orientalism (1978) analyses knowledge as power; Scott shows gender as a category of analysis, not an added topic.
Worked example
Prompt: why have interpretations of the French Revolution changed? Show the sequence - Lefebvre and Soboul read it as a bourgeois class revolution; Cobban questioned the social evidence; Furet emphasised political discourse and the Terror's internal logic. Explain the drivers: new archives, new questions after 1968, and distrust of class teleology. Conclude that change reflects evidence and politics together.
Traps
Confusing historiographical 'revisionism' with political denialism. Treating interpretation change as mere fashion. Assuming newer is better. Naming a school without stating its method or its blind spot.