Later in the afternoon, I attended a talk, "Informal Conversations on the
Historian's Craft" by Robert Darnton.  (Darnton writes popular history
books.)  In this talk, he discussed his life and how it's affected what
he's done and his perspective on how one should do history.

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One of his major points, accompanied by an anecdote from his days at
Oxford, was that one should tell the history, not explain the theory
about why events turned out the way they did.  His tutor at Oxford,
after listening to him read an essay, in which the first half of the
essay discussed the idea of causality, about why the French revolution
occurred in 1789, asked, "Why don't you take down the scaffolding and
leave the building standing?"

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Darnton's other major point involved being conscious of one's sources. 
He began his talk with a story about being a beat police reporter and
learning to judge what is news.  Apparently major crimes, when done to
"(b)" victims (blacks), are not news and not worth reporting, but crimes
done to "(w)" victims (whites) are news. Newspapers are selective.  He
said, "what's been printed or digitized is someone else's judgment--why
limit yourself to only those documents?"  (Plus, when examining physical
documents, one finds things that aren't digitized, like notes on the
back of a letter.)  He wants people to go to primary sources.  History
is a "detective story."  He cited Tocqueville as an example of what
happens when one isn't conscious about where one gets information,
claiming Tocqueville's thesis is a product of the ("C-series") documents
he consulted.  Had he consulted other documents, Darnton says he may
have come to a different conclusion.  Similarly, Darnton always admired
a particular French revolutionary, but when he read some private letters
he found out the revolutionary wrote some pamphlets to manipulate
financial markets and thereby profit.