Question

In history we usually never just look at one letter, book, or picture, we look at hundreds even thousands before we say “we know what happened!” Why do you think we would do that?

Answer 1

because one single document can’t tell us what for sure happened, if we looked at thomas paines common sense and said “that means that everyone except thomas paine thought that we didn’t need to rebel”, we would be very wrong. so in short, we need to examine lots and lots of documents to learn everything that happened.