UGC NET History Practice Question

Which pioneer of modern scientific historiography emphasized the critical analysis of primary documents to reconstruct history "as it actually happened" (wie es eigentlich gewesen)?

Leopold von Ranke ✓

E.H. Carr

R.G. Collingwood

Fernand Braudel

Ranke's rigorous source-criticism, aiming to reconstruct the past "as it actually happened," laid the foundation of modern scientific history-writing.

What is the fundamental thesis expressed by E.H. Carr in his celebrated work What is History?

History is an unending dialogue between the present and the past, and between facts and the historian ✓

History is strictly a science, no less and no more

History is simply the biography of great men

History repeats itself naturally in deterministic cycles

Carr argued in What is History? (1961) that history is a continuous dialogue between the present and the past, and between facts and their interpreter.

The British idealist philosopher and historian R.G. Collingwood famously asserted in The Idea of History that:

All history is the history of thought, re-enacted in the historian's own mind ✓

Facts speak for themselves independently of interpretation

Historical events are governed exclusively by economic modes of production

History is an objective science based purely on quantitative data

Collingwood's idealist view held that understanding history means re-enacting the thought behind past actions in the historian's own mind.

In historical research methodology, the process of verifying the authenticity, authorship, date, and origin of a document is termed:

External Criticism (or Lower Criticism / Heuristics) ✓

Internal Criticism (or Higher Criticism / Hermeneutics)

Synthesis

Historiographical Analysis

External Criticism (heuristics) checks a source's authenticity — is the document genuine, correctly dated, and by the claimed author.

The evaluation of the reliability, accuracy, credibility, and truthfulness of the statements contained within a historical text is known as:

Internal Criticism (or Higher Criticism / Hermeneutics) ✓

External Criticism

Paleography

Sigillography

Internal Criticism examines whether the content of an authenticated source is actually credible and truthful.

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This question is part of our free Unit-Wise mock test series, drawn from the same real question bank used across every UGC NET History mock test on this site. For structured, chapter-by-chapter notes covering everything these questions test, see our UGC NET History Notes, or try the History Glossary Flashcard Quiz for daily term-by-term practice.