not only does history have mules, all the players are mules.

the current historical fashion is that you have to have perspective, separation from the events to see them properly in context. as the old joke goes, when three historians are asked to evaluate the role of napoleon bonaparte in history, the american says "he single-handedly changed everything". the european says, "he was an inevitable product of his times, if not him, someone else would have played his role". the chinese historian thinks for a while, then answers, "i think it's too early to tell yet". still, a historical method that depends on the observer being as far away from the scene and the facts as possible is inherently suspect to me.

i read somewhere (it may have been right here on the zone!), that no one knows or really understands a battle, or a war, for that matter. the soldier on the line only sees the little piece that is happening immediately around him, the general at headquarters stares at maps and reports, but never hears a shot being fired or a sees a drop of blood being spilled. who really understands what happened, and why?

pushing the war metaphor, everything we know about the pelleponesian war is from what thucydides wrote about it. he seems to have been a fair reporter, plainly telling us what he saw or, if he wasn't there, what he learned about it and how. he appears to be scrupulously honest, with very modern historiographic methods, but he was the first to admit he had an axe to grind. he fought for one side and was accused (unfairly, he claims) of incompetence and treachery, so he defected to the other. he's our principle source for what occurred in one of the most pivotal events in western history. and what is really funny is that scholars are still arguing over just exactly what it was thucydides meant.

some events can be verified archaeologicaly, or as you point out, by the sheer weight of statistical methods. but in general, history is a fog. and when you try and sort it out, what can you really say? to this day i, or anyone else, cannot begin to understand why the first world war was fought. oh yeah, there's a lot of hand waving about conflicting colonial ambitions and interlocking treaties and the sheer momentum of events, but i have yet to hear one convincing reason why millions of men had to die horribly in the trenches. yet the leaders of that time certainly believed it was inevitable, and necessary. and as i mentioned, your own civil war is still being debated by scholars who claim to know why it was "really" fought.

another recommendation: barbara tuchman's "the guns of august" is a terrific insight into the pointlessness and confusion of the first world war. it is also very controversial, when it first appeared it was bitterly attacked on ideological grounds because of supposed inferences and implications on tactical conditions that developed half a century after the period she was writing about. her theme, that military planners and strategists, unaware of how a new kind of war will actually unfold in real time, tend to paint themselves (due to logistical considerations) into strategic corners and devise nightmares of their own making. when the book appeared, the sixties, the implications on nuclear war fighting strategies were sensational. in fact, a tv dramatisation of the cuban missile crisis was entitled "the missiles of october".