The “explain how we got here” approach to history has some pretty big limitations. The historical actors had no idea where the future was going. When we examine their actions from the perspective of the single contingency that ended up happening we will almost necessarily miss meaningful understanding and make things seem inevitable when they really weren’t.
There’s interesting writing to be done in this mode but it is definitely not the primary mode.
> The historical actors had no idea where the future was going.
Does it matter in order to explain how things came to be?
Understanding their motivations, the incentives that led them to do what they did, the sociopolitical context they were inserted into, the limitations of a historical perspective (quite often the accounts of past historical figures were written by people invested in portraying it in one way or another).
All those things would help, when looking at history critically, to make some sense of the present and where things might be going in the future.
In a sense, things that happened were inevitable because they came to pass. We are not talking about a possibility, we are talking about a certainty long after the fact. Understanding that it might have been avoided in some ways can be helpful, but also is an exercise in wishful thinking and guesswork.
There’s interesting writing to be done in this mode but it is definitely not the primary mode.