How do historians study people? We evaluate our evidence, obviously. I argue that we sometimes perform a 'reality check' on our evidence, applying human insight to it. This is a small aspect of the way in which historians, like other humanities and social science scholars, study human beings from the inside. This interior view sometimes presents difficulties, but it also gives us advantages. If we were Martians, studying humans from the outside with no insight into human behaviour, we wouldn't have this advantage.

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