THE PAST,” the great French historian Marc Bloch once wrote, “is, by definition, a datum which nothing in the future will change.” This seems so obvious as scarcely to merit mention. Is not the common expression “That’s history” another way of saying that something is finished, over, dead and gone? Yet Bloch also wrote that history “is constantly transforming and perfecting itself.” This is not so obvious, yet anyone who reads knows that history is constantly being rewritten. New books on old subjects pour from the presses in an unending stream.

The reason Bloch’s apparently contradictory statements are both true is that the word history has two meanings. History is indeed the past, “what actually happened” as another great historian put it. But history is also what people have written about the past. To make the distinction clear in what follows, I shall refer to the past as “history” and to writing about the past as “History.”

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