You can’t observe historical events; you can’t question historical actors; you can’t even know most of what has not been written about. What has been written about therefore takes on an importance that may be spurious. A few lines in a memoir, a snatch of recorded conversation, a letter fortuitously preserved, an event noted in a diary: all become luminous with significance–even though they are merely the bits that have floated to the surface. The historian clings to them, while, somewhere below, the huge submerged wreck of the past sinks silently out of sight. . Louis Menand
About This Quote

The quote above is quite true. History can be quite an interesting subject to study, but historians are always looking for the most interesting parts. They only focus on the obvious little details, instead of taking a good look at the bigger picture. For instance, historians are not much interested in what happened in the past several centuries. They are only interested in what happened within the last 100 years or so.

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