Passage
The relationship between memory and historical writing is more intricate than is often acknowledged. While facts, once verified, are treated as neutral building blocks, the act of arranging them into a narrative alters both their meaning and their authority. As historians from the nineteenth century onward have noted, the "truth" of history is not merely in what happened but in how it is made legible. One might argue that the professionalization of history, with its insistence on footnotes, chronological order, and disciplinary rigor, has produced a style of narrative that privileges closure, causality, and coherence. Yet such conventions may obscure the provisional nature of all historical knowledge. What students frequently absorb, therefore, is not the open-endedness of inquiry but the conviction that the past can be definitively settled through neat stories. In learning to emulate this form, they inadvertently practice a kind of intellectual containment, narrowing their capacity to recognize ambiguity, to hold competing explanations in tension, or to test unconventional frameworks for making sense of the past.
