What follows is based on the premise that the historian is a literary craftsman who composes in words, for the mind's eye, a picture of the past. He works in the realm of imagination, for it is only in imagination that he can recapture people, places, and circumstances that, in their physical reality, are gone forever.

It hardly needs to be said that the image the historian presents should be as close as possible to the vanished actuality it pretends to represent. How does he go about meeting this requirement?

One way is by research. The historian combs through such records as the past has left: official documents, letters, eyewitness accounts, reports at second hand. In pursuing this research he is in a position similar to that of a jury in a criminal trial. He has to discriminate among the bits and pieces of evidence in terms of credibility, selecting those that are then combined in his imagination as one combines the pieces of a picture-puzzle, the objective being to end up with as complete and convincing a picture as possible of the people involved, of the circumstances, and of what actually happened.