Status Updates From المشهد التاريخي: كيف يرسم ا...

'...historians may stand, in their relationship to the past, in something like the position states do in their relationship to territory and society. For in "mapping" the past, the historian too is laying down a grid, stifling particularity, privileging legibility, all with a view to making the past accessible for the present and the future.'

'The narrative is the form of representation that most historians use. What narratives do...is to simulate what transpired in the past. They're reconstructions, assembled within the virtual laboratories of our minds, of the processes that produced whatever structure it is we're seeking to explain. ...in all of them, we ask ourselves: "How could this have happened?"

'For just as the social sciences were attempting to prove their legitimacy by moving toward the predictability that had characterized physics since the days of Isaac Newton—the methods [Henry] Adams had hoped to apply to history— the physicists themselves were moving away from that approach.'

LOVE this so far