This is our inaugural mailbag column! Folks ask us questions about the wherefores and what-have-yous of history, we try to answer them. There is also a fun fact at the end.
What exactly does “contingency” mean?
This is a historical concept that provided part of the inspiration for our name. Basically, it’s a fancy word for how any given historical event is dependent on a multitude of interrelated factors. No event has a single cause. Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke offer this explanation in a 2007 essay: “To argue that history is contingent is to claim that every historical outcome depends upon a number of prior conditions; that each of these prior conditions depends, in turn, upon still other conditions; and so on. The core insight of contingency is that the world is a magnificently interconnected place. Change a single prior condition, and any historical outcome could have turned out differently.”
An example: Bob, a mild-mannered 20-year-old, is sitting in a jail cell. Why? His friend Joe invited their mutual friend Hank to a party they were throwing at Bob’s house. Bob didn’t want to invite Hank to the party because he’d already invited Sam, and Sam and Hank had long hated each other thanks to a Magic: The Gathering session that ended on bitter terms. But Joe really wanted Hank to come to the party because Joe and Hank had been good friends ever since they were next-door neighbors as kids. Bob acquiesced to Joe because Bob had heard Sam was sick and so probably wouldn’t be at the party anyway.
However, it turned out Sam just had one of those 24-hour bugs and did make it to the party, and as soon as Sam and Hank spotted each other, the wounds of their years-old trading card game spat were reopened and a fisticuff ensued. Bob told Sam and Hank to take their fight outside, where at least they would not break anything. Bob normally would’ve been more cautious about this, because his neighbors were habitually nosy and prone to calling the police. But they were supposed to be gone this weekend, enjoying their timeshare on the Gulf. What Bob did not know, however, was that his neighbors cancelled their plans at the last minute due to an unseasonal hurricane. His neighbors heard the row and called the police. When the police arrived they arrested Bob and several of his friends for underage drinking and making a public disturbance.
So why is Bob in jail? Because Joe’s and Hank’s families happened to move next to each other in the 1990s; because Sam wanted to follow tournament rules while Hank was just trying to have a good time; because Sam got just sick enough for just long enough; because the fossil fuel revolution has sparked an increase of the world’s average temperature and a concurrent rise in freak weather events; because in 1984 the U.S. Congress mandated that states raise the minimum drinking age or else lose 10% of their federal highway funding—these are all valid answers.
Rather than looking for a single cause, a historian reconstructs the complex set of factors that converged in a particular place and time. And this is, in a sense, why it’s still worth researching things that have already been written about. Every historical topic, no matter how small, contains multitudes, and there is no limit to the questions that can be asked. Let’s look at it this way; okay now, this way.