ABSTRACT
If, as historians state, history is rewritten every generation, it is not typically because subsequent evidence has developed clearly refutable tests of previous hypotheses but because different weights are assigned to the existing evidential material to provide different explanations consistent with current ideology . . . [Even] in the present world, replete with immense quantities of information, the ability of scholars to develop unambiguous tests of complex, large-scale hypotheses that are involved in explaining secular change is very limited. Therefore, competing explanations tend to have a heavy ideological cast.
