ABSTRACT
History changes. And indeed, if it did not, there would be little point to historical research, for most historians would be doing scarcely more than collecting and organizing tidbits of information— and perhaps, very occasionally, discovering new bits in hitherto unknown archives and adding them to the pile. This is the sort of endeavor that Robin Collingwood dismissed as “scissors-and-paste history,” but it is most assuredly not what historians actually do with their time. 1 The resulting stark contrast between The Past itself, which must be immutable, and historians’ decidedly mutable accounting of it seems puzzling at first blush; and has long served as fodder for wit, ranging from Franklin P. Jones’ observation that, “Perhaps nobody has changed the course of history as much as the historians,” to Pogo Possum’s (Walt Kelly’s sage-resident of Okefenokee Swamp), lament that “The past ain’t what it used to be.”
