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The ten historical concepts

The list, and why it is the question bank

Ten historical concepts are what historians' skills are used to identify. Every exam question since 2022 has been headed with one of them.
Only five of them appear at Level 2. The other five are Level 3 additions.

Concept	At Level 2 too?	Seen in a Q heading 2022–25
Perspectives	Yes	Yes — Q1 in 2022 and 2024
Cause and effect	Yes	Yes — Q1 in 2023 and 2025
Continuity and change	Yes	Yes — Q2 in 2022, 2023 and 2025
Reliability and usefulness	Yes (as reliability/bias)	Yes — Q3 in 2022 and 2024
Intent and motivation	Yes	Not yet
Past and present	No — Level 3 only	Yes — Q3 in 2023
Influence and significance	No — Level 3 only	Yes — Q2 in 2024, Q3 in 2025
Bias or propaganda	No — Level 3 only	Not yet
Specific and generalised	No — Level 3 only	Not yet
Contingency	No — Level 3 only	Not yet

Four turn up less often than the others. They are still part of the ten, and any of them can be applied to a set of sources. Learn all ten.

What each concept asks you to look for

Perspectives — whose view is this, and what made them see it that way? Not just what different people thought, but why their position, interests or experience produced that view. What lifts an answer here is showing how motivation, background and identity shaped the view — the person's stake in the outcome, where they stood, who they took themselves to be.
Cause and effect — what led to this, and what followed? A cause-and-effect reading asks what led to X, and it expects the introduction plus early sources.
Continuity and change — what moved and what stayed the same? Both halves are required, and this is reliably the hardest concept to evaluate in a set of sources. The answers that handle it well are the ones that address both parts of it separately.
Reliability and usefulness — two separate questions. Reliable asks whether the source is accurate. Useful asks what it is good evidence for. An unreliable source can be highly useful — evidence of what someone wanted believed.
Intent and motivation — why was this source made, and what was the maker trying to achieve? Distinct from perspectives, which is about how someone saw things rather than what they wanted.
Past and present — how does this compare to now, or to a later time in the sources? A set might pair advertisements from 1961 and 1970 with 2016.
Influence and significance — how much did this matter, and to whom? Bringing a significance framework to the answer — how many were affected, how deeply, for how long, and whether it is still felt — gives the analysis a structure to push against instead of a list of effects.
Bias or propaganda — is this source trying to persuade, and by what means? Bias is a slant; propaganda is deliberate persuasion. Neither makes a source worthless.
Specific and generalised — is this one case or a pattern? Whether a single example in the sources can support a claim about the whole.
Contingency — could it have gone otherwise? What depended on chance, timing or an individual decision rather than on underlying conditions.

The two concepts most likely to catch you out

Continuity and change is the most-used concept and the one candidates handle worst.
- It is the hardest of the concepts to evaluate in a source, because a source shows you a moment and continuity is about what did not move across many of them.
- The failure is always the same — answering one half. Writing only about continuity, or only about change, leaves half the question untouched.
- The fix is mechanical: write one sentence for each half before you write anything else.
Reliability and usefulness is misread as one concept.
- Reliability is about accuracy; usefulness is about what the source is evidence for.
- The classic Level 3 move: a source that is unreliable as a record of events may be excellent evidence of the attitudes of the person who produced it — and the 2026 context is about attitudes.

Tips and Tricks

Name the concept explicitly in your first sentence. Addressing a concept implicitly, and leaving the reader to infer that you meant it, is a common and expensive habit. Writing "The sources show both continuity and change in…" costs eight words and removes any doubt.

For any two-part concept, write both halves before you elaborate either. Continuity and change, cause and effect, reliability and usefulness, past and present, intent and motivation, specific and generalised — six of the ten come in pairs, and dropping half of a pair is the most common single error in this paper.

Do not treat "unreliable" as "worthless". A biased newspaper editorial is unreliable as a record of what happened and is first-rate evidence of what its readers were expected to believe. In a paper whose 2026 context is about attitudes, that move is where the useful reading lives.

Prepare the four concepts that have not yet been a question heading. Bias or propaganda, intent and motivation, specific and generalised, and contingency are all fair game, and someone who has never thought about contingency will lose time working out what the question wants.

Worked Example

Two named sources are to be judged for reliability and usefulness — how useful would they be to a historian studying attitudes at the time.

One source is a signed letter to a newspaper, written by a resident arguing forcefully for one side of a local dispute. A candidate writes:

This source is not very reliable because the writer is clearly biased. They only give one side of the argument and use emotional language. Therefore it is not very useful to a historian.

What has gone wrong, and how should it be rewritten?

Step 1 — separate the two questions the concept actually contains.

Reliability asks: is this an accurate account of what happened? Usefulness asks: what is this good evidence FOR?

The first has been answered and the second assumed to follow from it. It does not, and the assumption is the error.

Step 2 — check the reliability judgement itself, which is sound as far as it goes.

The observation is correct. A partisan letter is a poor guide to events. But note the reasoning is generic — biased, one-sided, emotional language could be written about any partisan source without reading this one. A reliability comment that could be written without reading the source has not been made about the source.

Step 3 — apply the usefulness question properly, by asking what the question wants evidence of.

The question asks about attitudes at the time. For that purpose:

The bias is not a defect. It is the data. A letter arguing forcefully for one side is direct evidence that this position existed, was held strongly, and was thought fit to publish.
The fact that a newspaper printed it is evidence about what was sayable in that place at that time.
The arguments the writer chose — what they thought would persuade neighbours — reveal shared assumptions the writer did not need to argue for. Those unargued assumptions are the most valuable thing in the source, and finding them is reading between the lines.

Step 4 — rewrite it, keeping the reliability point and correcting the inference.

Step 5 — note what that rewrite has actually added.

Both halves of the concept addressed separately, rather than one half elaborated at length.
A conclusion drawn from what the source does not say — which is exactly what insight means here: reading between the lines to draw conclusions that go beyond the immediately obvious.

Reliable and useful are two questions, not one. An unreliable source is often the most useful evidence available for what people believed — and in a paper about attitudes, that is the move the concept is asking for.