What you’ll learn to do: examine the complex and contradictory nature of historical events

In this section, you’ll learn more about how to study complex historical events. While historians generally agree on what happened, explaining why something happened can be substantially more difficult. We have to study primary sources to try and learn what a person’s motivations were, but even those can be difficult. Historical actors rarely put all of their thoughts on the page, and what they leave behind for us to study can be contradictory or incomplete. Ultimately, we have to draw on these primary sources to craft narrative explanations of why something happened. Here, we’ll study Woodrow Wilson’s hopes and plans for postwar peace, and the different ways that those plans were implemented and contradicted during the postwar peace talks.