The most important object to historians and their field of study are facts. Facts are the skeletal structure to history, and without them, there would be nothing to build history on. As Edward Carr said in What is History, "historical facts are the same for all historians and which form...the backbone of history (Carr 8)." A fact is independent from the historian, but is the historian interested more in single facts or the connection between facts, which then makes it evidence? A single incidence is a fact, but to become evidence it must go through the theory and i

nterpretation of a historian because historians are interested in the connection of facts. Richard Evans summarized it best by saying, "Facts thus precede interpretation conceptually, while interpretation precedes evidence (Evans)." It is the duty of the individual historians to provide an accurate interpretation, just as Houseman says, "'Accuracy is a duty, not a virtue (Carr).'" But there in lies a contradiction - there is no such thing as accurate interpretation when one is talking of history. Historians must formulate an answer to all of their facts, but these answers are often clouded by the historians' society and upbringing.

History is the active study of finding the answers, the causes, of events. History consists of a series of causes and it is the job of the historian to find these causes and determine their significance. They must do this because it is essential to the interpretation of their facts and both are equally important to the understanding of history. As Carr said, "The relation of the historian to his causes has the same dual and reciprocal character as the relation of the historian to his facts (Carr 135)." All causes are important to history and to the historian; in fact, they are so significant that the change in one cause could reroute history as we know it. This belief is called determinism, which is defined by Carr as the "belief that everything that happens has a cause or causes, and could not have happened differently unless something in the cause of causes had been different (Carr 121)." It allows for nothing in history to be described as an accident, because this act would signify the work of an inactive historian who suffers from intellectual laziness. To avoid this, one must continually ask "Why?" in studying history. Often, people will just search for the explanation or the logic behind the situation, instead of reasoning with the multiple causes. This questioning of how it happened almost always leads back to why it happened and therefore, it is beneficial for one to just ask "Why?" instead of going in circles.

The interpretations of facts are often subject

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Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)