  This account of historical explanation departs sharply from a positivist theory like the covering law model (Hempel 1942; Nagel 1961) because it holds that a historical explanation aims to explain not just the occurrence of an event but its cognitive significance, which Oakeshott calls its “character”. Unlike scientific explanations, which postulate repeatable events, historical explanations postulate events that are individual and unique. Positivist theories of historical explanation get things backward by assuming that the event to be explained is already understood as an instance of a type of event, but the historian cannot make this assumption. Historical inquiry is not an exercise in explaining an event whose character is known in advance of the effort to explain it. This character has yet to be established, and it can be established only by showing how antecedent events led to it rather than some other event. The relationship between an antecedent and a subsequent event is a “contingent” one in which the meaning of the subsequent is illuminated by the antecedent.