PeRMaNnTLY LoST said:
hey guys, this may be a rather stupid question but i thought that we, in essays/responses, are not allowed to refer or quote to historians like bradley etc..
for example say: "according to bradley"..etc
can someone please respond to this as i am majorly confused and i have trials in like 3 weeks now!! HELP!!
I don't fully understand what you say. 1. Do you mean that you're not allowed to quote historians, or that 2. you're not allowed to quote historians like Bradley?
1. With quoting historians, generally: You should should have a quotation or a paraphrase in every paragraph of your essay. Along with this, you should have one primary source. One modern and one ancient source per para will sit you in the top band, if your essay is good.
2. With quoting historians 'like Bradley': There has been huge arguments about this topic on this board. Officially, quoting historians 'like' Bradley, Callender, Lawless, is fine. Callender is a world expert on the Middle Kingdom, and wrote her PhD thesis on women during that period. She is involved in marking, as is Jen Lawless and Pam Bradley - so, to go towards getting marks - referring to them can be a good idea.
Despite this, all three of them are high school teachers. Some pretentious people, who have little or no idea about research positions, think that being a high school teacher does not qualify you to be a historian. They think that you need to be a professor, or some such, sitting in your office knee-deep in books. The problem with this is that research positions are difficult to get, impossible if you don't want to move overseas by yourself. I can assure you that, had this been 19th Century continental Europe, research positions would be available for Bradley, Callender, and Lawless.
There's also the argument that all these people might actually want to teach, not research, but I think that the stigma attached to teaching (ask any intelligent teaching student) makes people assume that they're unworthy of the title 'historian'.
Another objection to using people like Bradley and Lawless is that they are intentionally writing an HSC textbook. This is evident in none of them use their own translations, their own research, etc. Therefore, some people contend, their ideas are too secondary to be used in an essay. The people that contend this interest me; I question how a student in year 12 would have time to read through the laboriousness that is Gardiner, or the silly psychological babble that is Assmann. Lawless and Bradley are excellent in that they give you the page numbers to go to in Gardiner (not in Assmann, thank the lord), so you can go to the right page. Reading any of the 'greats' for study is not productive. Using them to pick out ideas and quotations is fine. Therefore, I'd say that the claim that Bradley and Lawless are only textbook is silly.
That being said, you would be silly to *only* quote the very modern historians like Bradley, Lawless, and Callender - you should certainly have a range. Even better if you can play one historian's ideas off another in the same paragraph, eg: 'Cerny believed that Akhenaten's changes were purely religious, whereas Ockinga calls the king a political "arch-reactionary".'.
