This isn't a mistake per se, or something that I think should be against the rules, but it annoys me when people attack the question as having too many multiple interpretations and then not giving an answer, or being able to give an answer, for any of those interpretations.

Like someone asks, "What was life like as a peasant in Medieval Europe?" And someone posts, "The Medieval period was a big time and the peasant experience was very different c. 600 and c. 1200 CE that you can't really compare. And things of course weren't the same between countries! A Spanish peasant wouldn't have had the same experiences as an English peasant who wouldn't be very much like a Russian peasant. You have to specify which you mean." And the original questioner goes, "Yeah, okay, great! I actually am interested in all of those possibilities! If you need me to pick, I'll say English peasant c. 1000, but if you can tell me more about any of those things, I'd be super psyched." And then... silence. The person nit-picking the question was surely well intentioned, but they did not add anything to the discussion. If they did anything, it was perhaps make OP feel stupid, which is something I am strongly against (XKCD, Woody Guthrie). If a question asks about race in the Roman Period, and you have multiple paragraphs explaining what it means that "race is socially constructed", with specific references to the Roman Period, that's not what I'm talking about, at all. What I love about AskHistorians is that it's a place where lay people can learn some details about complex history, a place where they are included in the academic conservation (even if its only as observers and questioners), but in general a place that lifts people up to the academic level, without dismissing people as dumb or gatekeeping them out with jargon. It's a place that makes people feel smarter, not dumber, and I feel that those type of "clarifying" questions often make people feel dumber rather than clarify much of anything for anyone.

I think the biggest mistake I see is assuming there is a single narrative that, if spelled out clearly, represents "history as it really was" or some variant on that idea. By this logic, there could be a hypothetical future in which the past had been perfectly mapped and historians would perhaps be particularly well versed in that narrative, but would no longer need to research the past in the same way.

To put this another way. To ask "what happened?" is one of the questions historians ask, but not the only one by any stretch. It's not just about the answers and approach to questions that need to be elucidated, it's the kinds of questions themselves that need to be addressed to really get at the crux of the issue.

Historians are interested in questions like:

What did this event, person, artifact, text, etc. mean to historical people? When you hear people talk about Cultural History they are usually talking about the history of meaning in one way or another.

What engine(s) drove this event or change? What underlying aspects of society, interpersonal relations, political systems, environment, cultural institutions, etc. caused and or allowed changes to happen. Much of historical theory is interested in this question. Without diving in too deep, I think it's currently fashionable to emphasize a need to understand the different engines that influence change over time rather than searching for the engine of historical change.

What is the overall context in which this event happened/person lived/etc.? Historians never want to look at anything in a vacuum and emphasize that things are interconnected. As an addition to this, historians ask "How does this evidence fit with other evidence I've encountered? Does it seem to confirm something I already knew or does it complicate things further? If it complicates things, how does my understanding of the whole context need to change to accommodate this new evidence?

How can I give a full and complete explanation for these events? Historians embrace complexity. Historians read broadly in their field and encourage others to do so because there is no such thing as the "definitive" history of something.

How does my historical study fit into the larger historical discourse? The study of the historical discussion itself is called historiography and is a critical part of professional historical training. As the well-known historian E.H. Carr once described, history is a conversation between past and present and taking seriously the way those discussions themselves are conducted is an important part of the professional study of history.

I'd be happy to add some more if you have specific questions about any of that, but I think that's a decent start.

I believe that one of the biggest errors in this sub is question-askers assuming that competing theories have equal weight. And sometimes question-answerers giving equal weight to competing theories despite the fact that one theory is widely regarded as correct and others are not.

Of course, there are certainly many, many historical subjects that still remain in dispute because of a lack of evidence one way or the other. In those cases, competing theories can and should be debated and that's what professional historians do. They try to dig up new evidence to shed light on such controversies in the hopes of getting closer to the truth. One often-asked example is the fate of the Roanoke colony. A good answer will go through all the facts, and lay out competing theories and why these theories are usually considered to be the most probable by professional historians, but also why none of these competing theories can be accepted with any absolute certainty. That's great and that's appropriate.

But there are many other subjects that are more or less settled. And by "settled", I mean that the probability highly favors one theory over others. To paraphrase one of my favorite historians, we live in a world of probabilities and one theory with ample evidence versus another with a few anecdotes that "feels" right always favors the side with the evidence. That's not to say that alternate theories shouldn't be mentioned at all, but they should be given the proper perspective. Yet, here on this sub and even in the world of professional history, these tenuous competing theories are often presented as an equal, alternate interpretation to the more widely accepted evidence-based theory.

One of the most well-known examples, just asked here again in the last couple days, is that of the JFK assassination. Professional historians at this point more or less take it for granted that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. There is ample evidence to prove it, it has been studied extensively, and there's little to no evidence pointing directly to any other alternate explanation. Yet, in pop culture, you would be led to believe that nobody knows for sure what really happened. (Caveat that I'm not an expert on the subject, but have read enough well-researched literature on it to understand what the general consensus is among professionals.) Luckily, this particular question usually gets answered satisfactorily in this sub, but similar questions often don't.

This isn't to dispute /u/TenMinuteHistory's point elsewhere in this thread, that there is no "one" narrative of history. That is certainly very true. Historians debate all the time over the why's and how's of history. Taking the above example, historians can debate all day about Lee Harvey Oswald's motivations, the cultural context under which he did it, the effects that the assassination had on U.S. politics, and so on. But the "who, where, and when" is much less debatable: Lee Harvey Oswald, in Dallas, on November 22, 1963.

And to back up /u/TenMinuteHistory's point, one of my pet peeves in this sub are questions that seem to be looking for a concrete answer to a somewhat open ended question. These questions usually begin with "To what extent..." or "To what degree...". I'm always unsure what kind of answer the questioner is expecting. A percentage? "Some", "much", "a lot"? The answerers thankfully mostly avoid this, and say, "That was a factor, and this is how it factored in..." But it seems to me many of these questions are hoping for an answer that will confirm their biases that motivated them to ask the question in the first place. (More examples 1, [2] (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4m7ql7/to_what_degree_was_manifest_destiny_religious_in/), 3.)

While I'm off on a rant, another pet peeve is the amount of questions that properly belong in /r/askanthropology because they quite obviously predate preserved written records, but that's somewhat forgivable because not everyone understands exactly what the scope of "history" is. What's worse is the opposite, where there are questions that do have a concrete answer, but are often responded to with unsubstantiated folklore or, "Nobody knows for sure!" A good example of this is the misinformation about when and who first went to Los Angeles to make movies. It has a very specific answer that has been written about, and even the misinformed folklore and how it spread has been written about. But if you do a quick Google search or read the answers usually given in this sub (1, 2, 3), you'd think "Nobody knows for sure but probably because it's sunny" or else "Unnamed East Coast filmmakers were trying to escape the Edison Trust, and L.A. gave them a quick getaway to Mexico." That first answer is only partly true, and that second answer is completely false, and it's been widely debunked, but if you ask it even here on /r/Askhistorians, it's usually the answer you'll get.

what do you all understand that we don't get?

Evidence, evidence, evidence. Interpretations of evidence can certainly diverge substantially, but any historian worthy of the title will always form their assertions based on solid evidence. Even reputable secondary sources can make faulty claims and often do. Just look at how far and wide the "Edison Trust" explanation for the film industry's move to Los Angeles is, even in published works. That's because some historians cited unsubstantiated claims made back in the 1930s, and then later historians took it for granted that these claims were true. When scholars went back and dug up the primary sources, they found how wrong it was, and so the truth often gets buried beneath a mountain of misinformation.

If you can understand that, and are willing to comb through primary sources yourself, and are willing to take nothing for granted and question even long-held assumptions, you can often do a great service to our historical understanding.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the streetlight effect, which is perhaps the biggest problem in all of history, even more so than many other disciplines.

So often in history people concentrate their studies where it's easiest. People do research where the evidence exists and is easiest to get at. More than that, people work in the grooves that others before them have made. People become interested in history through exposure to the work of others, which often draws them to the well worn fields that others have worked in. You'd think there would be a drive towards striking out toward less studied areas to make a name for oneself, and this does exist, but it's much less common than you'd think. A lot of history is incestuous in a way, retreading the same material and not expanding the horizons as much as it should.

This is even more of a problem in areas where the evidence is extraordinarily hard to come by. You can have two civilizations of equal importance living side by side for centuries, if one is literate and the other not, if one leaves behind stone buildings and stone/metal artifacts while the other leaves behind little more than footprints and descendants, historians will devote orders of magnitude more effort in studying one versus the other. More than that, even historians will fall into the trap of believing that the more "well preserved" culture is the more important one.

Unfortunately, the problems don't stop there. Historians can fall into a somewhat subtle trap of elevating the thin, patchy, almost certainly only partially correct thread of "accepted history" to a status of "truth" that it doesn't deserve. That thread may represent our best and most well corroborated "facts" but it is never infallible and it is always, always, massively incomplete. It can be very tempting to treat anything outside of that narrow thread as unsubstantiated speculation but the reality is that the truth lies out in that space as well. It's very difficult for historians (or scientists in general) to maintain a healthy relationship with their level of ignorance of a subject. Unfortunately, a lot of times history ends up being under assault by people who have agendas, or are just ignorant, and this makes it rather difficult for historians to nurture their sense of their own ignorance, though it's important nonetheless.

This has the added annoying consequence of increasing the difficulty of breaking out of historical narratives that were built on, for example, racist ideologies. The study of history is weighed down by the mass of previous work, which can keep the thumb on the scale in terms of retaining the weight of study and the narrative focus. You see this especially in the attempts to expand the traditional eurocentric narrative of "the history of western civilization" toward a study of "world history". In large part we're still stuck in the ruts of that western civ. narrative with only occasional adornments added on to it. And the efforts to break out of those ruts are not entirely suitable to the scale of the task.

Separately from my other point, one thing that I see as a social scientist is that a lot is that historians often miss cross-cultural patterns. Of course, why should they see them? They don't have training in noticing them, they often don't have training very far geographically from their specialty, the minimum is of course just enough to teach a Freshman survey class. But often when we look at patterns we can see that Jews share similarities to Ottoman Armenians share similarities with Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia share similarities with Parsisi in the British Raj share similarities with Koreans in 1980's LA. We can explain why any one of these groups is successful/resented as a specific case, but we can also look at how they all operate within largely the same structure. I don't fault historians for not seeing or saying that, because that's literally not their job, but if I could encourage one thing, it would certainly be more comparative history and a greater awareness of some of the main findings of historical social science (state-making, nationalism, etc.).