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Even when they aren't motivated by politics or ideology, historians muddle what really happened. They have to: reality is too unruly to fit between the covers of one (or several) volumes. The historian picks facts the way a mountaineer finds a route across a boulder field: one fact leads to another and then another and yet another, allowing the historian to cross the ground in reasonable time. Important boulders are inevitably bypassed; rocks of lesser significance are included on the route for what they lie between.
Histories, moreover, require plots--the networks of causality that distinguish histories from mere chronicles. But causality, beyond the most trivial kind, is nearly impossible to prove. Most of us like to think we are rational, at least some of the time, and perhaps we are. But often rationality is a polite name for rationalization, and the stories we tell ourselves about our motives are simply that: stories. "So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature," Benjamin Franklin observed, "since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do." A. J. P. Taylor put the same point differently. "History is not another name for the past, as many people imply," the British historian explained. "It is the name for stories about the past."
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