'The great historian — or perhaps I should say the great thinker — is the man who asks the question ‘Why?’ about new things or in new contexts.’ E. H. Carr, What is History?
When Carr wrote this in the early 1960s he was challenging the popular view that history was about narrative — that is, that it involved providing a well-told story, based on facts, about the past. Carr implied that narrative, as linked to describing what happened in the past, was a low-level skill. His view was that interrogating the facts by asking why something happened or why somebody carried out a certain action was far more challenging than stating what happened.
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