How+to+answer+a+History+Extension+case+study+question

**__How to answer a History Extension case study question__**
This page is to give advice on how to answer an examination style question relating to the Crusades case study.


 * //DO NOT REWRITE A PREPARED ESSAY!//**

The examination for History Extension is not suited to prepared responses. Questions and Sources will be different every year and require you to focus your attention and knowledge on specific and pertinent issues relating to that Source. If you have prepared much of your response on the use and abuse of sources by historians and then the question/source relates more to the impact of an historian's context on their work, you will not engage well with the question. Make sure you understand each of the issues covered in the syllabus and find some sources you can use to debate each issue so that you can develop a sophisticated argument rather than regurgitate a static and predictable response.

It is your responsibility to find and understand other sources (quotes and extracts detailing the arguments of historians) in order to develop an "arsenal" of useful and relevant arguments with which to test, rebutt and affirm the argument presented in the Source and your own position.

For example,

Source: "History is always about white men who won battles"

Your position: This is a very generalised and simplistic statement for a 21st century perspective. Masculine histories and perspectives have dominated western historiography, however, women writers and historians have always existed even in ancient cultures such as Greece and Rome and grew to prominence since the 1960s and especially 1970s feminist movement. In current western societies, women historians are just as respected and read as male historians...

[So far, this response has made a strong argument relating to women writers OF history, but has not actually engaged with the idea that history is always ABOUT men (ie the content of historical works not the writers themselves)].

It is indeed correct of the Source to assert that the focus of writers has been on men and their exploits throughout history and most often the stories that last in history are those relating to the building, destroying or defending of nations and peoples. Warfare features heavily in many great historical works as either an accepted threat or as the focus of the writer's attention. Further to this, most often it is the victors of major conflicts that assert their power to either rewrite or at least stamp their authority on the record and retelling of the past.