I'm a historian, so what?"

"The historian's god is chance. Cleopatra's nose, the Duchess of Marlborough's gloves, the Holy Roman Emperor's mushrooms, Hitler sending a dispatch a day later than he should have sent it - these are the true stuff of history. And the task of the historian is to accumulate more and more of such facts and put them in chronological order. His not to reason why; indeed, he must not reason at all. His world is an academic Garden of Eden, a nudist's paradise of naked facts, in which he may sport, inocent not only of the idea's of good and evil [...], but innocent of any ideas at all."

Alfred Cobban
The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution