What if many of a so-called Fact were little better than a Fiction?” asked Carlyle. It is a question most historians normally don’t brood over, although the more philosophical among them have never doubted that history always was and will be, in the words of Carl Becker, “a foreshortened and incomplete representative of reality.” To say this, he added, lessens neither its value nor its dignity.
All the same, today’s historians would like to believe that their narratives, if piecemeal, are at least faithful to tested facts and based upon more than hearsay. The myths and legends purveyed by the old chroniclers have long been discarded, and Clio, split from her sister Muses, is now comfortable with computers. The kind of monumental history favored in the nineteenth century by scholarly and lettered gentlemen-amateurs like George Bancroft, William Hickling Prescott, John Lothrop Motley, Francis Parkman, and Henry Adams has long gone out of fashion. It has been replaced by the no-nonsense monograph, conceived by specialists for other specialists and stripped of pageantry, descriptive set pieces, dramatic confrontations, and authorial reflections.
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