Field studies overview: SQA Advanced Higher History

Advanced Higher History examines one chosen field of study in depth, and every field's examinable issues carry a historiographical debate to argue. This guide covers a representative spread of fields, European, world, medieval and Scottish, to model how field content is argued. Study your own centre's field in depth; use these as patterns for the technique.

Germany 1815 to 1939

Nationalism and unification, the Kaiserreich, the collapse of Weimar and the rise of the Nazis, threaded by the Sonderweg debate over whether Germany followed a special path that made democracy's failure and Nazism more likely.

Russia 1881 to 1921

The decline of Tsarism, 1905, 1917 and the civil war, centred on the optimist-pessimist debate over whether Tsarism could have survived but for the First World War, and the debate over Lenin and popular radicalisation in October 1917.

The USA 1918 to 1968

The experience of immigrants and black Americans, the New Deal and the civil rights movement, centred on the top-down versus bottom-up debate over how civil rights advanced, and on competing readings of the New Deal.

The Crusades 1071 to 1204

The origins of the First Crusade, the crusader states, the Muslim response and the later crusades, centred on the motivation debate between materialist and revisionist (Riley-Smith) interpretations of why people crusaded.

The struggle for Scottish independence

The succession crisis and Great Cause, Edward I's intervention, Wallace and Bruce, and the achievement of independence by 1328, centred on agency versus structure and the contested, myth-laden reputations of Wallace and Bruce.

How to use this module

Learn your own field's issues, sources and historians in depth, and use these patterns to argue a line with historiography rather than narrating events.