By Dr. Wanjiru Njoya

Professor Clyde Wilson’s observation that “history is not a mathematical calculation or scientific experiment but a vast drama of which there is always more to be learned” has important methodological implications. First, it implies that formal academic history credentials, while valuable, are not a necessary precondition for understanding history. Second, it means that the methods used to understand natural phenomena—such as the study of physics or biology—are not appropriate to historical inquiry. For example, some people attempt to understand the causes of the Civil War by counting the total number of words in secession declarations then calculating the percentage of words devoted to “slavery.”

The American Battlefield Trust has even drawn up pie-charts to illustrate the percentage of words devoted to each topic, explaining that, “These charts show how many words were devoted to the issues raised in each state’s Declaration as a percentage of the whole.” They ignore the fact that the presence or prevalence of a word in a document does not tell you the significance of the document nor what explanatory value to attach to its claims. The attempt to understand history by quantifying words seeks in vain to lend an air of “scientism” and empiricism to historical narratives.

Wilson recognizes that history is more than just a litany of facts which, although true, may not by themselves yield much insight into the past. It is not enough to itemize historical facts—it is important also to understand the people who participated in historical events, their reasons and their motivations. Without that contextualization, it would be easy to construct a misleading or even false historical narrative based on a selection of facts cherry-picked for that purpose. Further, no list of facts can purport to be exhaustive, so an explanation must be offered for deciding which facts to include or exclude—it cannot simply be a random selection.

Ludwig von Mises emphasized the importance of understanding history by reference to the motivations and actions of individual participants in that history, to understand why they acted as they did and what they hoped to achieve. In his book Theory and History, Mises calls this methodology........

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