Historians progress from establishing what happened to explaining why it happened

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Neohistorical explanation thus leaves the new groups in place, does away with ontological forms of truth, and pays lip service to some more secular, ultimately determining, instance by anchoring its findings in the market rather than in the modifications of capitalism. The return to history everywhere remarked today demands closer scrutiny in the light of this “historical” perspective — only it is not a return exactly, seeming rather to mean incorporating the “raw material” of history and leaving its function out, a kind of flattening and appropriation (in the sense in which it has lately been said that neo-expressionist German artists today are lucky to have had Hitler). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 703 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Explaining why events happened is history’s most intellectually rigorous task — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting…, 100; Whole-trend historical explanations often mask escapes from responsibility; Neohistorical explanation flattens history into raw material, stripping its causal function — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 703 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Explaining why events happened is history’s most intellectually rigorous task #expands (0.92) — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 100
• Whole-trend historical explanations often mask escapes from responsibility #complicates (0.78)
• Neohistorical explanation flattens history into raw material, stripping its causal function #complicates (0.76) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 703