# What "Contemporary History" Is

History II · Contemporary History · https://tryals.app/learn/history-ii/what-contemporary-history-is

## Periodisation Is an Argument

Ask a historian in Barcelona when contemporary history begins. They will answer 1789. In Britain, it usually means the era after 1945. These traditions make different claims about **which rupture made the present**.

Period labels are compressed arguments. This course follows the Universitat de Barcelona convention, covering the late eighteenth century to **1945**.

**Reinhart Koselleck** identified a *Sattelzeit*, roughly **1750–1850**, when basic concepts shifted. The **space of experience** and the **horizon of expectation** came apart. People no longer expected the future to repeat the past.

| Scheme | Span | The claim it makes |
|---|---|---|
| Contemporary history (Romance tradition) | 1789 – present | The Revolution begins our world |
| Hobsbawm's long nineteenth century | 1789 – 1914 | Bourgeois Europe is one coherent epoch |
| Hobsbawm's short twentieth century | 1914 – 1991 | 1914 and 1989–91 are the real hinges |
| Koselleck's *Sattelzeit* | 1750 – 1850 | The break is conceptual |

## Sources and Historiography

Historical **sources** change radically in this era. Historians face mass media, censuses, statistics, and audiovisual records. The methodological challenge shifts from scarcity to abundance.

The **historiography** developed through key shifts:

* **Rankean history**: focused on states and diplomacy.
* The **Annales** school: founded in **1929** to study long-term social structures.
* **Marxist history**: prioritised class relations.
* **Cultural turn**: examined language and representation.
* **Global history**: challenged Eurocentric narratives.

> **Common pitfall:** treating period labels as neutral containers. Every boundary is an interpretive claim.

## Practice questions

11 of this lesson's 14 practice questions, with answers. The full set is in the app.

### 1. The Romance-language tradition begins contemporary history around 1789, while anglophone usage often reserves "contemporary" for the period since 1945. Why is this more than a difference of vocabulary?

A. One tradition focuses strictly on state archives whilst the other relies on material culture
B. Each boundary asserts a different rupture as the one that produced the present order
C. The two traditions disagree over whether the French Revolution was an entirely global event
D. Romance scholarship rejects the concept of periodisation, whereas anglophone history embraces it

**Answer:** B. Each boundary asserts a different rupture as the one that produced the present order

**Why:** A period boundary is a thesis about which change was decisive. Starting in 1789 makes revolution, citizenship and mass politics the founding facts of the present; starting in 1945 makes the world wars, decolonisation and the nuclear order founding instead. The evidence is the same; the argument about what explains what is not.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/what-contemporary-history-is/the-romance-language-tradition-begins-contemporary-history-around

### 2. Arrange these developments in the writing of history, earliest first.

**Answer:**

1. Ranke-style political history built on state archives
2. Bloch and Febvre found the Annales
3. Marxist social history places class relations at the centre
4. The cultural turn treats language as an object of study
5. Global history challenges the explanatory priority of Europe

**Why:** Each step is partly a reaction to the last. Annales rejected the primacy of diplomacy and event; Marxist history rejected Annales’ relative quiet about conflict; the cultural turn rejected the assumption that social categories are given rather than made; global history rejects all of them for treating Europe as the default case.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/what-contemporary-history-is/arrange-these-developments-in-the-writing-of-history-earliest-first

### 3. Koselleck argued that before roughly 1750 the word "revolution" carried the sense of a turning or a return rather than an irreversible break.

**Answer:** True

**Why:** **True.** The older sense is cyclical, a body returning to its starting point, or a state returning to an earlier constitution. The modern sense, of an irreversible movement towards something unprecedented, is one of the conceptual changes Koselleck used to define the Sattelzeit of roughly 1750 to 1850.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/what-contemporary-history-is/koselleck-argued-that-before-roughly-1750-the-word-revolution

### 4. Koselleck defines the Sattelzeit by a divergence between the 'space of experience' and the 'horizon of expectation'. What fundamentally changes in how historical actors perceive time when these two domains separate?

A. They treat historical developments as purely structural evolutions
B. They reject documentary archives in favour of theoretical models
C. They assume political ruptures occur on predictable cyclical axes
D. They view the future as open rather than bound by past precedents

**Answer:** D. They view the future as open rather than bound by past precedents

**Why:** When expectations uncouple from past experience, actors begin to imagine alternate, unprecedented futures rather than cyclical recurrences. Structural history emerged later with Annales, whilst source criticism and archival reliance actually intensified during this period.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/what-contemporary-history-is/koselleck-defines-the-sattelzeit-by-a-divergence-between-the-space

### 5. Sort each item by whether it is characteristic of the SOURCES available for medieval history or for contemporary history.

**Answer:**

- Medieval sources: A handful of charters surviving from one monastery, Archaeological evidence for diet and building materials
- Contemporary sources: Mass-circulation newspapers held in national libraries, Systematic census and government statistical series, Photographic, film and later sound recording

**Why:** The methodological consequence is the interesting part. Scarcity forces the medievalist to squeeze every source and to argue explicitly about representativeness. Abundance lets the contemporary historian find evidence for almost any thesis, which makes the principle of selection, rarely stated, the place where the interpretation actually happens.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/what-contemporary-history-is/sort-each-item-by-whether-it-is-characteristic-of-the-sources

### 6. Complete Koselleck’s account of what changed between roughly 1750 and 1850.

**Answer:** Koselleck called the period a **Sattelzeit**, in which the basic political vocabulary changed meaning. On his account the space of **experience** and the horizon of **expectation** came apart, because people stopped assuming the future would resemble the **past**.

**Why:** The claim is psychological as much as political. Once expectation detaches from experience, the future becomes a thing to be planned, feared and argued about, which is the precondition for ideology, for programmes of reform, and for the idea that history has a direction one might either accelerate or resist.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/what-contemporary-history-is/complete-kosellecks-account-of-what-changed-between-roughly-1750-and

### 7. Why do historians say that a period boundary is an argument rather than a fact?

A. Different boundaries organise the same evidence into different causal stories
B. Rival traditions place the same events in different periods
C. A boundary asserts that one change was more decisive than others
D. Historical periods are fixed by international agreement

**Answer:** A. Different boundaries organise the same evidence into different causal stories; B. Rival traditions place the same events in different periods; C. A boundary asserts that one change was more decisive than others

**Why:** The point is not that periodisation is arbitrary, some boundaries organise the evidence far better than others, but that it is answerable to argument. Choosing 1789 or 1945 or 1750 commits you to a claim about what made the present, and that claim can be defended or attacked.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/what-contemporary-history-is/why-do-historians-say-that-a-period-boundary-is-an-argument-rather

### 8. Match each periodisation to the claim it makes.

**Answer:**

- Contemporary history from 1789 → The Revolution begins the present order
- The long nineteenth century, 1789–1914 → Bourgeois Europe forms one coherent epoch
- The short twentieth century, 1914–1991 → The world wars and 1989–91 are the real hinges
- The Sattelzeit, 1750–1850 → The decisive break is conceptual rather than political

**Why:** Set side by side, the schemes disagree about what kind of thing a historical break is. Two are political, one is socio-economic, and Koselleck’s is conceptual, which is why his period straddles the Revolution instead of starting at it, and why his evidence is dictionaries and pamphlets rather than treaties.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/what-contemporary-history-is/match-each-periodisation-to-the-claim-it-makes

### 9. In which year did the Universitat de Barcelona syllabus’s period end, the closing date this course takes for contemporary history?

**Answer:** 1945

**Why:** **1945.** The choice is itself a periodisation claim: it treats 1914–1945 as a single catastrophe with an end, and everything after as a different problem. Historians who prefer Hobsbawm’s short twentieth century would run on to 1991 instead, and would be making a different argument about what the wars were part of.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/what-contemporary-history-is/in-which-year-did-the-universitat-de-barcelona-syllabuss-period-end

### 10. Arrange the steps of the argument that period labels shape historical explanation.

**Answer:**

1. A historian chooses a date at which a period begins
2. That choice asserts which change was decisive
3. Events before the boundary become background rather than cause
4. The narrative built inside the period inherits that assumption
5. A rival periodisation would make different events look causal

**Why:** The third step is where the damage is done quietly. Once something is pushed before the boundary it stops being a candidate explanation and becomes context, which is how a periodisation ends up producing exactly the causal story it assumed, with no dishonesty required at any point.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/what-contemporary-history-is/arrange-the-steps-of-the-argument-that-period-labels-shape-historical

### 11. The Annales school, founded in 1929, is chiefly associated with a return to diplomatic and political narrative.

**Answer:** False

**Why:** **False**: that is what they were reacting against. Annales displaced the primacy of events, treaties and great men in favour of economic structures, social relations, collective mentalities and the *longue durée*. Braudel’s Mediterranean, in which a whole geography moves more slowly than any king, is the programme carried to its limit.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/what-contemporary-history-is/the-annales-school-founded-in-1929-is-chiefly-associated-with-a