History Skills

For example, an author might write a biography about a famous general to convince you that they were incredibly brilliant at leading their armies. Therefore, authors will tell you specific information so that you believe what they’re trying to convince you of. For example, if they’re trying to convince you about the brilliant general mentioned before, they will share a range of stories about their greatest victories, or their most inspiring speeches. In this example, the author can use one of two ways to convey their information: either with the exact words or using a more subtle approach where they mention associated things that allow you to come to the same conclusion without using the specific words.

Most of the time, ‘history’ is when a professional historian writes a book to explain what a society, culture, person, or event might have been like, based upon the evidence that remains. The most common ways that historians construct a history is to present it in the form of a story, which we call a ‘narrative’. However, all historians admit that their histories are incomplete, because they have had to fill in a lot of the gaps in their story, since we don’t have all the evidence we would like from the past in order to write a complete story. As a result of the need to ‘fill the gaps’ in order to construct a narrative about the past, historians are open to hearing about how other historians attempts at writing history.

Usefulness is a judgement about how relevant or helpful a particular source is in providing information about your topic. If a source provides any information about the specific topic you're investigating, it is considered to be a useful source. If an exam question asks "How useful is the source in understanding the outcome of the battle?", and the source states that "Britain won the battle", we can conclude that "the source is useful in understanding the outcome of the battle because it explicitly states that "Britain won the battle"". Since a source's usefulness is based primarily upon its ability to provide valuable information on your topic, there are four different ways to prove that a source is useful:

Regardless of which of the two words are used, they mean exactly the same thing: they are asking you to assign a degree of importance to how influential or important a particular factor is regarding the topic at hand. A useful way of conceptualising the degree of importance, is to think of a simple scale that you could measure it against: Most of the time, a "to what degree/extent” question is ultimately asking you to decide a single factor’s importance in comparison to another, potentially equally important factor. To what degree was political ideology more important in Hitler’s rise to power than the economic conditions in Germany in the early 1930s? However, sometimes an essay question will only give you one factor, in which case you will need to choose the second factor to compare it against.