"History is just one damned thing after another.” That pithy summary was supposedly coined by Arnold Toynbee, but, as Frans van Lunteren points out, “every story needs a plot.” Faced with these contradictory constraints, historians who wish to do more than simply chronicle a succession of events are forced to impose story lines retrospectively. This can have the unfortunate effect of making the ending — the present — seem the inevitable outcome of the past.
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