TL; DR version: look at old stuff, think about it, write about it, and teach it.
I mean besides kicking butt at Trivial Pursuit. 😉 This seems to be something of a mystery, and historians haven’t done a great job of clearing things up. The answer that most historians give is that historians try to understand the past. But this isn’t really a satisfying answer for most people, since it sounds more like a philosophy than anything else. So in today’s blog post, following up from last week, I’m going to tell you exactly what historians do inside their little hobbit holes.