(^18) › STEP 2. Understand the Skills That Will Be Tested
“contingent” if its occurrence is possible but not certain. The sophisticated student of his-
tory understands that there is a profound sense in which all significant events in history are
contingent, because their occurrence depends on the action of human beings. For example,
one of the most significant events in the history of the French Revolution is the storming
of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. On that day, a crowd stormed the notorious fortress in the
heart of Paris, killed the guards who defended it, and paraded the severed heads of those
guards around the city. Historians seeking to explain this event point to powerful forces,
such as the politicization of the urban working people of Paris and their tremendous fear
that the armies of their king, Louis XVI, would descend upon the city at any moment.
But those same historians know that it was possible that the day could have gone very dif-
ferently. They know that the crowd believed that there were many prisoners and an enor-
mous amount of weapons inside the Bastille. They also know the crowd was mistaken; the
only prisoner was the Marquis de Sade (and he was imprisoned for moral depravity, not
political activity), and there were virtually no weapons inside the Bastille. These historians
know, therefore, that the situation could have been defused; the guards could simply have
abandoned the Bastille (the King’s cause would not have been harmed nor the Revolution’s
helped). But the guards were young, inexperienced, and insecure; they panicked and fired
into the crowd. Those completely unpredictable actions of the guards are the contingent
causes of the storming of the Bastille.
Putting Information in Context
The historian must put every piece of information he or she encounters into its “proper
context.” That means connecting that information to all of the relevant events or processes
occurring at the time and place in which the source of the information was produced.Constructing a Context for Past Events and Actions
The art of contextualization sounds complicated in the abstract, but in practice, it is really
about asking additional, logical questions about a given event or action in the past. For
example, one of the most notorious episodes in the history of conflict between England
and Ireland is the massacring of the inhabitants of two Irish towns, Drogheda and Wexford,
in September and October 1649, respectively. In the context of the English Civil War
(1642–1649), Oliver Cromwell and his anti-Royalist army were sent to Ireland by the
English Parliament to put down an anti-English rebellion that had been simmering there
since 1641. Between September 2 and September 11, 1649, Cromwell and his army laid
siege to the town of Drogheda. During the four days following Drogheda’s surrender,
Cromwell oversaw the killing of some 4,000 of its people. Similarly, 2,000 more people
were killed after the fall and surrender of the town of Wexford in October. Understandably,
these events have earned Cromwell a reputation for a level of impulsive cruelty that is prac-
tically unintelligible.
But making such actions intelligible (constructing an understanding of how such a
thing could occur) is precisely the task of the historian. To do it, the historian has to “put the
events in their context,” or, more precisely, the historian has to construct a context around
the event by asking further questions. In the case of Cromwell, historians have asked: Of
the many other towns that Cromwell forced to surrender in his nine-month march through
Ireland, how many times did he massacre a town’s inhabitants? The answer, interestingly, is
none. Did Cromwell view the Irish who resisted merely as military enemies? No, Cromwell
was among those within the Parliamentarian faction of the English Civil War who viewed
themselves as “Saints,” whose mission was to purify the realm of false religions. Accordingly,KEY IDEA03_Bartolini_Ch03_013-022.indd 18 12/04/18 3:15 PM