HIST 101, Introduction to Historiography, Lecture 2 — What Makes History Happen?

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A claim that one thing produced another — not merely that it came earlier.

Chronology is necessary but not sufficient. Establishing that the Stamp Act passed before the riot is the beginning of the work, not the end of it. A causal claim has to say how the one produced the other.

Historians distinguish kinds of causes: long-running background conditions, immediate triggers, and the mechanism connecting them. A strong explanation also assigns weight — saying which causes mattered more, and why.

The error this guards against has a Latin name: post hoc ergo propter hoc, “after this, therefore because of this.”

The actual pathway by which a cause produced an effect — who did what, through which institution, with what resources, and in what order.

It matters because “taxes caused the Revolution” names a cause without naming a mechanism. Did the tax bite financially? Did it insult a constitutional principle? Did it hit every colony at once and so create a reason to coordinate? Those are three different mechanisms supported by different evidence.

If you cannot state the mechanism, you have named a correlation and called it a cause.

The capacity of people — individually or collectively — to make choices that shape outcomes.

Agency is not the same as freedom. Everyone acts under constraint: law, resources, distance, custom, bad information, and no map of the future. Agency means only that the choice was real and could have gone otherwise.

It also is not limited to the famous. Ministers and governors have agency; so do printers, clergy, merchants, crowds, households, soldiers, enslaved people, and Native diplomats. Action from below is not automatically more authentic, and elite action is not automatically more decisive. Both have to prove the mechanism.

An approach that explains major historical change primarily through the decisions and character of prominent individuals.

Its appeal is real. Leaders do make consequential decisions, individual choice is easy to narrate, and famous people are by far the best-documented thing in any archive — which quietly makes them look like the best-supported cause.

Its limit: it mistakes visibility for causality. A leader's capacity to act usually depends on institutions, resources, and other people's cooperation that the leader did not create. The corrective is not to deny that leaders matter, but to ask what made their action possible and effective.

A durable pattern of rules, relationships, resources, or meanings that shapes what people can do — constitutions, markets, property systems, bureaucracies, labor systems, religious institutions, settlement patterns, even language.

Structures last because people repeatedly act through them, institutions enforce them, and resources are distributed so that some actions are easy and others expensive.

Cultural structures count. A recurring ritual like Pope's Day is as real a structure as a tax code: it organized people, assigned roles, and told them what to do in the street.

What to avoid: talking about structures as if they act on their own. A legislature is rules, precedents, a building, clerks, constituencies, and money. Someone is always doing it.

A family of approaches treating economic structures — production, property, labor, class relations, who bears costs and who captures gains — as central to explaining historical change.

Its distinctive questions are genuinely productive: who controlled land and capital, who paid the tax, whose livelihood was at stake, who stood to benefit. Applied to August 1765, it asks who was actually in the street and what they had to lose.

Its recurrent risks: treating stated belief as merely a mask for interest, assuming a whole class wanted one thing, and naming an interest without showing the mechanism.

These are not special defects of materialism. Every explanatory tradition has a matching failure mode, and all are held to the same standard.

“Do individuals make history, or do larger forces?” is a useful provocation and a bad answer. Historians treat agency and structure as mutually constitutive — each one exists through the other.

People act through structures: the institutions, resources, and shared expectations available to them are what make an action possible and effective. And structures persist only because people keep enacting them — a rule nobody enforces stops being a rule.

This is why the same institution can be a constraint and an instrument depending on who is using it and when. Pope's Day divided Boston every November and organized it in August.

An account that organizes the past as steady improvement toward a better present.

Progress is a legitimate historical claim, not an automatic error. Real gains happen and can be documented: institutions change, rights arguments intensify, participation widens.

But it is a claim, and claims get tested. Four questions make it precise: progress in what respect, for whom, at what cost, and compared with which alternative? An account that cannot answer those has asserted improvement rather than shown it.

The corrective is precision, not cynicism.

Explaining earlier events by the endpoint they eventually produced — as though the past were traveling toward a destination it already knew.

The problem is logical: the outcome cannot be the cause of its own arrival. People in 1765 could not act on knowledge of 1776, and treating them as early participants in a revolution they had not imagined explains nothing.

It also distorts selection. Once you know how the story ends, the events that point toward the ending look important and the ones that do not look like noise — which is exactly how the second night in August became forgettable.

The warning is narrow. You may still judge the past, and you may still describe genuine improvement. What you may not do is let the outcome quietly become the explanation.

The idea that an outcome depended on a particular convergence of conditions, choices, and timing — and so was not settled in advance.

Contingency is not the claim that events have no causes, and not the claim that anything could have happened. An outcome can be heavily constrained and still not inevitable.

Its practical use is to give historical actors back their uncertain future. Colonial leaders spent years seeking rights within the empire, loyalties stayed divided, and nobody in Boston in 1765 was working toward independence.

The pattern by which earlier steps make some later steps easier and others more costly — so that a sequence narrows the range of live possibilities without ever determining the ending.

A catalyst is an event that accelerates a process already underway rather than creating it. The Stamp Act did not manufacture Anglo-colonial tension; it gave existing tension an occasion, a target, and an organization.

This is why repeal did not restore the old world. The grievance was withdrawn; the committees, printers, correspondence, and a population that had now done this once all remained. Each step made the next cheaper and retreat costlier.

Asking whether an outcome would probably have changed if one factor had been absent or different.

Historians use it as a test of causal weight, not as storytelling. If removing a factor changes nothing, it was probably background rather than a driving cause.

The discipline is in the restraint: alter one variable and reason carefully about the consequences. Alter several and the exercise stops being history.

A necessary cause is one without which the outcome does not occur in this form. A sufficient cause is one that produces the outcome by itself.

In history, genuinely sufficient causes are rare. Most historical outcomes require a combination of conditions, none of which would have produced the result alone.

Keeping the two apart prevents a common error: showing that something was necessary and then writing as though it were the whole explanation.

The level at which a historical claim operates — an individual, a town, a colony, an empire, a continent, a century.

Different scales require different evidence and support different kinds of explanation. One riot can be explained by local rumor and neighborhood ties. A pattern of riots across a dozen ports requires imperial policy, communication networks, and shared political language.

The discipline: do not use evidence gathered at one scale to prove a claim at another. And remember that a large outcome can emerge from many local actions that no participant intended.

Herbert Butterfield's name, from The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), for history written backward from the present — treating the past as a story of steady advance toward current arrangements.

Butterfield's specific target was a school of English constitutional historians who narrated the past as the progressive triumph of liberty and Parliament. His general point outlived that quarrel.

Three habits identify it: sorting historical actors into friends and enemies of the present; praising whoever most resembles us; and explaining events by the outcome they eventually produced.

This is teleology operating as a whole way of writing history rather than as a single mistaken sentence.