Explaining why events happened is history’s most intellectually rigorous task

Evidence

What is the historian trying to do? First, on the most rudimentary level, to find out what happened. Then, at a rather more sophisticated level, to find out how it happened. And, for the intellectually ambitious, why it happened. This is surely the really interesting part of understanding the past. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 100

Categorization

• XREF: A clean three-tier ladder of historical inquiry (what/how/why) that parallels science’s descriptive-to-explanatory progression.