ABSTRACT
The amateur fashion of looking at history is to regard it as a simple array of generally undisputed facts. The most important part of history is clearly a series of problems, and more than half of the historian’s work is to make a statement of attempted solutions. The solution of highly limited problems being usually assigned to monographs or articles, historical periodicals specialize in them; anyone who examines the reviews devoted to history in most important countries will see that they are largely devoted not to portraits, descriptions, or narratives, but to resolving old problems. Someone may produce a standard history of the land-system of medieval Yorkshire, or the tax-budgets of Chicago. The history of the French Revolution was first written from a political standpoint, by writers who were immersed in the politics of their own time and treated the revolutionary events in a way which harmonized with their views of contemporaneous affairs.
