Summarised Notes – WW1, Arab-Israeli, Russia & Contestability of the Past

Resource Description

2. The Contestability of the Past

Content Focus

Students investigate problems relating to the contestability of the past, focusing on sources available to historians. The Historical concepts and skills content is to be integrated as appropriate.

Students investigate:

• how historians test hypotheses about the past through the corroboration of sources
• problems associated with the evaluation of sources: authenticity, and reliability and usefulness for particular historical inquiries
• the importance of understanding the historical context in the interpretation of sources
• the role of sources and evidence in the evaluation of different theories about the past

Examples that could be used to illustrate aspects of the content include: the sinking of the Lusitania; Hitler’s diaries; Pearl Harbor – a surprise attack?

Provenance	the place of origin, or earliest known history of something. Something’s origin.
Causation	A process that includes a range of possible reasons for an historical event, situation or development.
Continuity and Change	Aspects of the past that have remained the same over a period of time or have changed over time. Change can be understood as a ‘process‘.
Perspectives	A point of view from which historical events, problems and issues can be analysed, for example the perspective of an individual or group in the past. This may involve empathetic understanding – the capacity to enter into the world of the past from the point of view of a particular individual or group from that time, including an appreciation of the circumstances they faced, and the motivations, values and attitudes behind their actions.
Significance	The importance attributed to a particular aspect of the past such as an individual or event. Significance involves an understanding of the various considerations which cause different groups at different times to judge aspects of the past more or less historically significant.
Contestability	Contestability involves examining how interpretations and representations of the past differ, for example, as a result of using differing evidence or resulting from different perspectives.
Propaganda	Information used to promote a political issue. Often presented in form of a poster, the information may be exaggerated or misleading.
Fake News	Unreliable information put into a seemingly reliable source, i.e. News report.
Corroboration	Where two or more sources provide supporting evidence for a particular claim.

Case Studies:

LUSITANIA:

•     Passenger boat
•     Sunk by German U-boat
•     1198 men, women and children were killed
•     Sunk May 7th, 1915

.      Captain William Turner received 6 warning that there were activities of u boat in the area that had already sunk boats. He was ordered to travel at top speed in a zig-zag motion.

•     Captain ignored warnings, continued slow and travelled in a straight line
•     “Passenger boat” secretly carried war munitions
•     Captain Walther Schwieger did not warn Lusitania that it would be under attack

GOETZ GAFFE:

•       Medallion created by an amateur German medallist, Karl Goetz
•       Created to shame the British for using civilians to hide war munitions
•       British used a mistaken date to turn the medallion into anti-German propaganda
•       British accused the Germans of a premeditated attack
•       It was a representation of events e.g. the coin showing the people buying tickets from the skeleton is symbolic for no one listening to the warnings about the U-boats, and travelling/sailing to their doom