My class this semester on historical publications has turned out to be much more interesting that I could have imagined (and I had thought it was going to be pretty good). We're starting out the semester along the lines of what Professor Reese described as a graduate seminar on the nature of history, and rather than learn about historical topics as one would in a course, say, on the American Civil War, we are learning what history actually is.
This is but a poor sample of the texts I've been reading, but I thought it appropriate in both concision and depth:
We are accustomed to say that "the present is the product of all the past"; and this is what is ordinarily meant by the historian's doctrine of "historical continuity." But it is only a half truth. It is equally true, and no mere paradox, to say that the past (our imagined picture of it) is the product of all the present.
From "What Are Historical Facts?" by Carl L Becker, read in 1926 and published in 1955.
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