... as the "backbone" of history. History would be nothing without them, they are essential factors in the piecing together of a historical narrative. Whether history can be considered a science or not is debatable. History can however be defined simply as accounts of what happened in the past. This is an absolute truth. It can also be more generally identified as an academic discipline, which seeks to provide explanations for or to compose accounts of what happened in the past. Richard J. Evans defines a historical fact as simply 'something that happened in the past'1. E.H Carr controversially argued that a past event didn't become a historical fact until it was accepted by historians, that these facts did not 'exist independently'. Evans disagrees with Carr's standpoint as he states that a historical fact is simply 'something that happened in history' and the question of whether that fact was verified by a ...

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