World History › Section A · Studying the past and early humans › Topic A.3
Causation and interpretation in history
History is more than a recounting of events — it is the search for why they happened. This topic teaches how historians rank causes at different depths, how schools of interpretation from the great man theory to postcolonialism sharpen the picture, and how to meet the past on its own terms.
In this topic
- Causation: the why behind events
- Levels of causation
- Worked example: why the Berlin Wall fell
- Interpretation and the great man theory
- The pushback: Romantics and Tolstoy
- Progressive history and its collapse
- Social history and social constructs
- New lenses: class, gender, and the colonised
- Worked example: one era, six lenses
- Historical empathy
- Common mistakes to avoid
- Key takeaways
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