I'm a tenth grader and since 5th grade, history has been my strongest subject. Today I was talking to one of my old history teachers who had read over a paper I wrote about Sam Houston and Thomas Hart Benton and he told me that I wasn't really analyzing the history, I was just reciting it. He told me that without understanding motivation in history and without interpreting the actions of the people, history was useless. So I was wondering how I can go from just writing a paper about what happened to a point where I am actively thinking about and analyzing the past with complexity. I hope to be a historian myself someday, so I'd like to know how to start thinking about history in a way that I can start going beyond comprehesion and how to ask the right questions.
One way to approach your problem is to read more than one account of the same subject. Then you can analyze what is the same between the accounts and what is different. After that, you can try to puzzle out why the differences exist. Was it the author's interpretation? Was it a disagreement about what a source meant? Was there new evidence discovered between when the sources were written? That, in my opinion, is how you get to the meat of history.
The question I always ask and search for is " Why?"
What were the motivations?
I also love "what if's" as they help me understand the decisions and why they were made. Military commanders and politicians look at and study out all the possible outcomes then make decisions of that. I try to do that and see Why they made that decision.
Though a lot of historians don't like what ifs.