April 28, 2000

Professing History: Distinguishing Between Memory and the Past

By ELLIOTT J. GORN

It's not easy being a historian. Tell people you study literature, and they see you as an arbiter of taste. Scientists help solve the problems of humanity. But historians not only spend inordinate amounts of time with the dead, they work in a field where all the stories have been told, all the questions answered. Joan of Arc is martyred, Hitler invades Czechoslovakia: predictable and depressing.

Of course, it's more complicated than that, but not by much when

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