The Power of the Thesis, Part 2: Unlocking Historical Interpretations

In a post last week, I made that case that developing a thesis – one central line of argument – is crucial for students’ own writing at KS5.

Here, I’d like to pick up the idea of a thesis as a central line of argument to suggest how it can help students understand other people’s writing, in particular historians’ interpretations. I’ll make the case that, when faced with a historian’s interpretation of the past, students should focus on finding a central argument, and that, further, doing so is actually vital to them understanding that historian’s interpretation.

This post relates particularly to the treatment of interpretations in the AQA A-Level History Paper 1; but I hope the ideas it raises might be of some use to teachers teaching other exam board specifications and even at different key stages.

 

KS5 Interpretations: Beyond “Fact vs. Opinion”

The interpretation question on AQA’s History A-Level History Paper 1 has achieved infamy.

Asking students to “assess how convincing the arguments” given in three “extracts” (i.e. historians’ interpretations) are using their “contextual knowledge”, it gives students an hour to read three paragraphs, identify the argument in each, plan a coherent answer, and write six paragraphs of their own weighing up each interpretation (without comparing or contrasting those interpretations).

Students tend to struggle badly. When I marked for AQA in the summer, the average marks came in at between 13 and 14 out of 30.

Why?

One key piece of feedback lead examiners themselves have given is that students struggle to find the argument in each extract, and often fail to distinguish “fact” from “opinion”.

I think the emphasis on finding the argument is absolutely correct. Yet, while the distinguishing between “fact” and “opinion” seems at first sight logical, this is, I think, less straightforward.

Firstly, when writing interpretations, historians deliberately construct their arguments about the past using facts as evidence. Consequently, facts and opinions are intertwined. As historian Richard Evans has noted on this question. “historians are seldom if ever interested in in facts entirely for their own sake”, instead deploying them as evidence to test and support their arguments (In Defence of History, pp. 76-77). The selection of facts is, therefore, itself a constituent part of constructing an argument. This is not to say that historians routinely skew or manipulate facts the support prior judgements. But it does mean that arguments themselves rest at least in part on the subjective judgement of the historian about which facts are relevant as evidence, and how much emphasis should be placed upon each.

What does this mean for students considering extracts in their exams?

In the AQA 1H History A-Level paper last summer, students were asked this question:

Using your understanding of the historical context, assess how convincing the arguments in these three extracts are in relation to social change in Communist Russia in the years 1917 to 1941.

Asked to focus on social change, students were given three extracts, each presenting a particular argument.

The third extract, by D. Christian, is given below. It presents the argument that, having set out to achieve social equality, the USSR had in fact developed a new social hierarchy by 1941, dominated by Communist elites.

The first thing to say is that, while argument this is a judgement of the historian, and therefore subjective, it is also a basically incontestable statement of fact, insofar as the “party leaders, industrial managers, shock workers, army officers, police officials and intellectuals” cited as evidence did indeed amass power and wealth which greatly exceeded that of ordinary people.

There are countervailing pieces of evidence, most notably that the position of these elites became extremely precarious during Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, which disproportionately targeted Communist and state elites. These pieces of evidence can be presented to challenge the interpretation’s argument, if we believe that the evidence used in the extract had been given excessive weight by the historian. Yet this does not mean that there was not a new elite which had formed; that indeed remains factually accurate. “Opinion”, in this case, is very clearly dependent on “fact”.

The second reason “fact” and “opinion” cannot always be straightforwardly disentangled is that each extract tends to present a number of subjective judgements, or “opinions”, on the basis of its selected facts.

Knowing this, we might be tempted to encourage students to analyse several “arguments” they can find for each extract, perhaps presenting one as the “main argument” and others as “sub-arguments”. But this approach quickly runs us into problems.

 

Seeing the Thesis as One Central Argument

Considering again Extract C, above. D. Christian seems to make a number of statements of “opinion”: “the October Revolution launched a transformation of Russian society”, “in 1929, the Soviet government launched an assault on these remnants of capitalism”; “the society that emerged [from this point on] was very different from the socialist ideals of the October Revolution”; and “a distinct [privileged] social group evolved”.

All of these statements are on one level or another subjective judgements of the historian. But they are not all discreet “arguments”. If we take them all as discreet arguments, the extract starts to lose its coherence, as it appears to point in different directions, giving a multitude of different views on social change in Russia and the USSR without connecting them together.

Instead, the statements in Christian’s extract build towards a larger central argument, or thesis, namely that the USSR developed a new social hierarchy after 1917, and especially from 1929, dominated by Communist elites. This thesis, which is best incapsulated in the final line of the extract (“instead of a classless society, a hierarchical society dominated by a privileged elite had developed”), is therefore in effect Christian’s argument in Extract C.

This is typical of historians' extracts given in the AQA’s Paper 1 at KS5. Each extract has one clear line of argument, which is best encapsulated by one statement, but which is supported and developed by other statements within the extract.

There are a couple of important caveats to add, however. The first is that, although extracts tend to have one statement which best sums up its central argument, or thesis, this is not always the final sentence as it is in this extract (it is also not always the first sentence, as students often tend to assume; often the main line of argument appears mid-way through the extract).

The second caveat is that, although Christian follows one coherent thesis in his extract, that thesis is not simple and does not contain just one idea. Rather than simply arguing that Russia and the USSR saw a new, Communist elite emerging, Christian actually points out Stalin’s renewed “assault on these remnants of capitalism” was a crucial turning point, after which the creation of a new elite accelerated. In other words, there was a change between 1917 and 1941, especially after 1929, that moved Soviet society in this direction.

This is the case with most of the extracts for AQA’s History paper 1. Extracts may present a single thesis, but this thesis is usually complex, combining more than one idea to develop its argument. For example, an extract may acknowledge the limitations of its thesis (although it will also dismiss these limitations); challenge other interpretations; place its thesis in a specific temporal or spatial context (like Christian does by focusing especially on the period after 1929); or acknowledge a diversity of experiences or views from history that means its argument is not universally applicable. Continuity markers and conjunctions in the extract, such as “although”, “while”, and “despite”, give an important clue as to when this is happening.

This means the argument of an extract is usually complex and has multiple layers. In other words, it can have more than one part to it, and it can even appear to be moving in more than one direction. When this is the case, although the thesis is to be found in one statement, we might be able to better express it through a combination of two statements, with another statement modifying or qualifying it. For example:

Stating that although ‘the October Revolution launched a transformation of Russian society’, D. Christian argues that by 1941 and particularly since 1929 ‘instead of a classless society, a hierarchical society dominated by a privileged elite had emerged’.

This kind of complexity or adding of layers to an argument does not mean there is more than one argument. It does not even mean, as some students claim, that there is a “main argument” and “sub-argument”. Instead, all the statements combined built into the overall thesis. Complexity and layers serve to further develop the one overall argument the historian is making (just as a student can add complexity and layers to their own thesis statements, and thus their overall argument, in their essays).

 

Locating the Thesis

This still leaves open the question: how can we help students locate and identify the thesis of an extract?

As I mentioned at the start of the post, students tend to really struggle with analysing extracts. When marking for AQA last summer, the main reason for this in fact seemed not to be that students couldn’t distinguish between “fact” and “opinion”.

Instead, many students seemed unable to locate and identify the central argument, or thesis, of the extract. Some seemed to have no idea that the extract was actually trying to make one particular argument at all. As a result, many ambled gamely through the three extracts, identifying multiple “arguments” in a line-by-line analysis and giving brief and comments of varying relevance about each, in an approach the exam board has made clear limits them to about half marks.

To help students locate the thesis of an extract, it may help to teach them to follow a few steps.

1. Read the question first and establish what the extracts are actually going to be making an argument about (this very basic first step is not helped by the fact that, in the AQA exam paper, the extracts appear r before the question, implicitly nudging students to read the extracts first. If they do this, though, they won’t be reading the extracts for the information that is relevant).
2. Read the extracts for the first time. For each one, highlight all statements (whether “fact”, “opinion”, or a combination of both) relating to the question.
3. Annotate the statements to clarify what they are referring to. If any ideas are hinted at, or unclear, note down relevant own knowledge next to them.
4. Read the extracts for a second time. Consider the statements made in the extract and identify one statement which best summarises what the historian is trying to argue. This can be taken, in effect, as the historian’s thesis statement.
5. Consider if there is anything the historian says which complicates, or adds an extra layer to, the historian’s argument. Consider if there is another statement or quote that could modify or qualify the thesis statement.

This is what this might look like in the case of Christian’s argument in Extract C:

 

Thesis: Interpretations Analysis and Disciplinary Integrity

If this seems a rather convoluted approach, there are a number of things speaking in its favour.

Firstly, when it comes to students analysing interpretations, it actually simplifies the task of assessing and commenting on historians’ arguments. By establishing clearly, in the first instance, which one argument each extract is making, students can proceed with the task of exploring the strengths and weaknesses of that one line of argument (rather than picking through a maze of statements for each extract).

This isn’t just an A-Level skill. Indeed, we’ve recently begun to move in this direction with our KS4, asking students to identify the main argument an interpretation (in this case not a historian’s) is making about the past. It works remarkably well, especially given that our GCSE students are asked to consider not just the validity of an interpretation, but also the difference between two interpretations on the same question (the difference between the extracts is, of course, that they each make a distinctive argument about the past).

There are even opportunities to introduce this approach at KS3, asking students to read interpretations for argument by identifying the one statement upon which all others hang. While this shouldn’t be the only approach we take to interpretations at KS3 (this key stage, after all, shouldn’t just exist to service later exams skills), it can certainly be combined with a range of other approaches to interpretations.

Secondly, in a wider disciplinary sense, approaching historians’ interpretations in this way is also absolutely valid. In their own writing, historians very often identify one statement from another historian to establish a central argument (often with a view to making a wider comment on the historiography of their topic). Consider, as an example, Christopher Browning’s analysis of Raul Hilberg’s interpretation, in his brilliant summary of the question of Holocaust perpetrators in Ordinary Men:

The bulk of the killers were not specially selected but drawn at random from a cross-section of German society, and they did not kill because they were coerced by the threat of dire punishment for refusing. […] It was one of the fundamental conclusions of Raul Hilberg’s magisterial and pathbreaking study, The Destruction of the European Jews, which first appeared in 1961, that the perpetrators ‘were not different in their moral makeup from the rest of the population. The perpetrators were not a special kind of German.’ The perpetrators represented ‘a remarkable cross-section of the German population,’ and the machinery of destruction ‘was structurally no different from organized German society as a whole.’

Here, we can see Browning doing exactly what I’ve suggested our students do (albeit in a different order): summarising what a historian argues, supported by one central statement of argument  (“[perpetrators] were not different in their moral makeup … [or] a special kind of German”) which is given complexity or layers by other statements which modify it.

 

Final Thoughts

In the end, as with essays, the thesis is make-or-break for analysing extracts.

Students need to know what the extract is arguing, but also that the extract is making one central argument. Finding the thesis allows them to do this.

Where does this leave us, as teachers? When considering historians' interpretations and extracts at KS5, I’d suggest we should aim to help students to:

1. Understand that historical interpretations are built around a central argument, or thesis;
2. Identify the thesis through the words of the author, in the form of one central statement of argument;
3. Recognise the thesis relies on evidence, which can be tested and challenged through students’ own knowledge;
4. Recognise the thesis may be (and usually is) complex, with more than one part to it, despite it representing one overall argument.