ABSTRACT
Historians study causes all the time: what caused their evidence to have the features it has; what caused people to hold and express the beliefs that they did; what caused people to act as they did; what caused certain changes to occur in society; and so on. Causes have a dynamic function: they bring about changes. Conditions are the circumstances in which changes occur. Some are necessary for the changes to occur, and historians take most of these for granted. Others are comparative states of affairs, which can explain why one effect occurred rather than another.
