  Historical knowledge, as Oakeshott sees it, can therefore be said to be constructed. The ideas (“identities”) that the historian uses to organize an inquiry—the Renaissance, India, the Dreyfus affair—are designated, not discovered. And they are changing, not immutable, identities that dissolve under scrutiny into collections of events, which are themselves identities. They are not givens but organizing ideas that are themselves open to reconsideration. Historical explanation means illuminating the circumstantial meaning of an event in relation to its antecedents, which in a genuinely historical inquiry are always events and never scientific laws or processes. In a historical explanation, an event to be explained is made intelligible as the outcome of what the evidence suggests are the relevant antecedents. In this theory, which Oakeshott develops in the second of three late essays on historical inquiry (OH 45–96), a particular historical past appears as a collection of contingently related events, often presented as a story. But not necessarily: he disagrees with the view, which was gaining adherents at the time he was writing, that what distinguishes historical from other kinds of explanations is that they take the form of a narrative (Ankersmit 1983; Danto 2007). Historians do frequently construct narratives, but a narrative is not the only way to present historical knowledge. 