Explaining a perspective with evidence
What Achieved actually requires
- The standard's definition: "Analyse involves explaining, as an historian, different perspectives of the contested event."
- Two words carry the requirement.
- Explaining — giving the reasons for the perspective, not reporting its content.
- Different — plural, and genuinely different rather than variations of one view.
- Reporting a perspective: The council believed the scheme was necessary. That is what they thought.
- Explaining a perspective: The council measured the scheme against post-war land shortage, which was a national policy priority, and against a rating classification that recorded the flats as unproductive — so on the criteria available to them the settlement registered as a cost rather than as a reason to stop. That is why they thought it.
The four inputs to any perspective
- These are the raw materials of an explanation, and a strong section names at least three.
- Information — what this person or group knew, and what they could not have known.
- Interests — what was at stake for them. Naming an interest explains a view; it does not accuse anyone of dishonesty.
- Assumptions — what they took for granted and never argued for. The strongest determinant and the hardest to see.
- Position — where they stood: their role, their audience, what they were responsible for.
- The last one is the most under-used. A council minute is written by a body that must justify decisions to ratepayers; a newspaper is written for readers who buy it; a recollection is given to someone who asked a question. Each position shapes what gets said.
Evidence for a perspective is different from evidence for an event
- You are not evidencing what happened. You are evidencing what people thought and why.
- Four kinds of evidence, and the last two are the Level 3 ones:
- Direct statement — someone says what they think. Easiest and least common.
- Argument made — what a source argues for tells you what it thought contestable.
- What is assumed without argument — what a source asserts without support tells you what it expected to be shared. This is the strongest evidence of a widely held view.
- What is measured or counted — the categories a source uses encode what it thought mattered. Hectares rather than households is a perspective expressed as a unit.
- A perspective evidenced only by direct statements is a perspective evidenced by its own publicity. The other three are harder to find and much harder to dispute.
Making sure the perspectives are genuinely different
- The standard requires different perspectives, and the contested event definition requires a significant divergence.
- Two accounts can differ in emphasis without differing in perspective, and submitting those is the commonest way to fail the topic requirement rather than the analysis.
- The test: do the two perspectives disagree about something, or do they simply attend to different things?
- Attending to different things — one account discusses the economics and another the social effects. This is division of labour, not disagreement.
- Disagreeing — the two would give different answers to the same question. That question is the contest.
- If you cannot state a single question the two perspectives answer differently, you do not yet have two perspectives.
Fairness, and how it is checked
- State each perspective in its own vocabulary. A perspective described in its opponents' words has already been half-refuted.
- The test: would someone who held this view recognise your account of it?
- Three signs your account is loaded:
- Motive words replacing reasons — they only cared about, they were determined to. These attribute and do not explain.
- Scare quotes and hedges — the council's so-called "necessary" works. The quotation marks do the arguing.
- Asymmetric detail. The view you prefer gets three paragraphs and the other gets one. The imbalance is an argument you have not made.
Worked Example
Worked example
Note: the Riversdale Flats Drainage Scheme is an INVENTED case, and any historians referred to are invented.
A student must explain the county council's 1955 perspective — a view they disagree with. Here are two attempts.
Attempt 1:
Attempt 2:
Answer:
Step 1 — check Attempt 1 against "explaining, as an historian."
Only interested in, did not care, determined to — all three are motive attributions. They say what the council wanted and give no reasons.
And they fail the recognition test. No 1955 councillor would accept this as an account of their reasoning. This is a charge, not an explanation.
Step 2 — identify Attempt 2's opening move.
They evidence the perspective from what the sources count, not from what they say. Hectares and jobs, never households.
This is the strongest kind of evidence for a viewpoint, because a unit of measurement is a choice nobody defends and nobody can retract.
Step 3 — count the inputs named.
- Information — land shortage was a stated national priority.
- Position — a council must justify spending publicly, so the case had to be economic.
- Assumption — a rating classification treated as a description of the place.
Three of four, each evidenced. Interests are implied and not overworked, which avoids the motive trap.
Step 4 — note the assumption, which is the Level 3 element.
A step it never argued for, because it did not notice taking it. This is what "assumptions" means — not a hidden agenda but an unexamined move. It is also the thing that will later ground a legitimate judgement, since an unexamined assumption is an internal weakness rather than a retrospective one.
Step 5 — note the third paragraph, which most students omit.
It states what the evidence does not show — individual feelings — and cites the seven-to-two vote as evidence that the perspective was institutional rather than universal.
That distinction matters: a perspective is a position held and defended, not a description of everyone's private view. Saying so keeps the account accurate and pre-empts the obvious objection.