MATSEC AM History key terms

The study of how history is written, including the methods, assumptions and biases of historians, and how interpretations change over time in response to new evidence or new questions.

Evidence produced at the time of the events studied, such as letters, diaries, official records, speeches, photographs or artefacts. It offers direct testimony but still reflects the viewpoint and limits of its creator.

A later account that interprets and analyses primary evidence, such as a monograph, textbook or journal article. Its value depends on the author's research, argument and use of sources.

The documented history of a source's ownership and creation, used to establish whether it is authentic, when it was produced and whether it has been altered or forged.

An error in which an idea, object or practice is placed in a period to which it does not belong, often revealing that a source or interpretation is unreliable or that a historian has misread context.

The re-examination of established historical interpretations in the light of new evidence, new methods or changed perspectives, often challenging accepted accounts of causes, responsibility or significance.

A way of writing history, criticised by Herbert Butterfield, that reads the past as an inevitable march towards present freedoms and institutions, judging earlier actors by later standards rather than by their own context.

Explaining events as if they were driven towards a predetermined end or purpose. In history it is criticised because it attributes intention and inevitability to processes that were contingent and open.

The principle that historical outcomes depended on particular choices, accidents and circumstances and were not inevitable, so alternative developments were always possible.

The analysis of why events happened, distinguishing long-term structural conditions from short-term triggers and weighing the relative importance of economic, political, social and individual factors.

An approach, associated with the Annales school, that emphasises long-term social, economic and geographical conditions over short-term political events and individual actions.

The study of ordinary people's lives, work, family, community and everyday experience, often using quantitative records and oral testimony rather than the papers of elites.

The recording and analysis of spoken recollections as historical evidence. It captures experiences absent from written records but raises questions of memory, selection and interviewer influence.

A cultural movement from roughly the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries that revived classical learning and emphasised human potential, producing new art, literature and scholarship in Europe.

An intellectual movement of the Renaissance that studied classical texts and stressed human dignity, civic responsibility and education, shaping scholarship, politics and the arts across Europe.

The sixteenth-century movement that challenged papal authority and produced Protestant churches, reshaping religious belief, politics and society across Europe and triggering prolonged religious conflict.

The Catholic response to Protestantism, including reform of the Church, new religious orders and the Council of Trent, which reaffirmed doctrine and strengthened papal discipline.

A form of monarchy in which the ruler claims sole and unlimited authority, justified by divine right, centralising administration and reducing the independent power of nobles and representative assemblies.

The doctrine that a monarch's authority comes directly from God and that resistance to the ruler is therefore sinful, used to justify absolute power and to deny subjects a right of rebellion.

Rule by an absolute monarch who adopted some Enlightenment reforms in law, education or administration while retaining personal authority, as practised by rulers such as Frederick the Great and Joseph II.

An eighteenth-century intellectual movement that championed reason, science, toleration and individual rights, and criticised arbitrary authority in religion and government, influencing revolution and reform.

The idea, developed by thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, that political authority rests on an agreement among people and may be legitimately resisted when rulers break its terms.

The principle that ultimate political authority belongs to the people, who may establish, limit or remove governments, a foundation of democratic and revolutionary thought since the eighteenth century.

A political tradition emphasising individual liberty, constitutional limits on government, rule of law, representative institutions and free exchange, developing from Enlightenment ideas and nineteenth-century reform movements.

The belief that a people sharing language, culture or history should form a distinct political community, often an independent state; a powerful force in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European politics and conflict.

The extension of a state's power over other territories and peoples, through conquest, settlement, economic control or informal influence, a central feature of European expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The rapid late nineteenth-century competition among European powers to claim African territory, formalised by the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and justified by economic, strategic and civilising claims.

The process by which colonies achieved political independence, often through nationalist mobilisation, negotiation or armed struggle, reshaping the international order after the Second World War.

The transformation of production from handcraft to mechanised factory industry, beginning in eighteenth-century Britain, which reshaped work, cities, class relations and global economic power.

The economic doctrine that markets should operate with minimal state interference, influential in nineteenth-century industrial policy and in debates over welfare, regulation and free trade.

The growth of towns and cities as populations move from the countryside, typically driven by industrial employment and producing new social problems in housing, sanitation and public order.

The theory developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that history is driven by class conflict arising from economic relations, and that capitalism would be superseded by socialism through revolutionary change.

The organisation of workers to bargain collectively over wages, hours and conditions, and to campaign politically, a major force in industrial societies from the nineteenth century onwards.

The principle that government should be limited by a body of fundamental rules, written or customary, and that rulers are accountable under law rather than ruling by personal will.

A system in which a monarch is head of state but exercises power within a constitution and alongside an elected parliament, as developed in Britain after the seventeenth-century revolutions.

A twentieth-century form of rule seeking total control over public and private life through a single party, ideology, propaganda, terror and modern organisation, applied to Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.

A radical nationalist and authoritarian movement of the early twentieth century that rejected liberal democracy and class politics, glorified the nation and violence, and sought a powerful state led by a single leader.

The deliberate use of information, images and rhetoric to shape opinion and mobilise support, studied as an instrument of wartime and authoritarian rule and as evidence of political values.

The prolonged geopolitical rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies after 1945, conducted through ideology, arms races, alliances, proxy wars and propaganda rather than direct war.