  Given Oakeshott's view of the importance of history among the human sciences, the sustained attention that he devoted to it is not surprising. History is the first mode he considers in Experience and its Modes and he returns to the topic often in later writings. History as a mode of thought is not a record of past events but a distinct way of identifying and explaining them. The task of the philosophy of history, as Oakeshott sees it, is to clarify what distinguishes historical from other kinds of inquiry. Historical investigation cannot simply record historical events because what is identified as an event depends on evidence, and what counts as evidence must itself be established. The point, fundamental to the modern discipline of critical history, was made in 1852 by Gustav Droysen, who argued that 