[Some historians hold that history] is just one damned thing after another.

The line is a sardonic jab at a view of the past that treats events as mere sequence—an unshaped chronicle of happenings—rather than as something that can be explained through causes, structures, and patterns. Read this way, it contrasts “history as narrative list” with “history as interpretation,” implying that without analysis (of motives, institutions, economics, culture, contingency), the past becomes only a chain of episodes. The profanity underscores impatience with simplistic historiography and the human desire to find meaning: the quote suggests that what makes history valuable is not the accumulation of facts but the attempt to understand why one thing follows another and what, if anything, it signifies.