ABSTRACT
Historical narratives, processes, and even facts do not exist in nature, waiting for recognition. Rather, we shape phenomena into facts, relate them to one another in patterned ways and construct intelligible narratives that make sense out of human actions. Was World War II in Europe, commonly praised in the United States as a good, just war, a great victory over a brutal, genocidal, fascist dictatorship; or was it just one of a series of nineteenth-and twentieth-century wars that weakened and dismantled the European empires in favor of nation states? Was World War II the start of a great American economic and military empire that finally defeated the Soviet empire and contained the emerging Chinese empire; or did World War II begin a fragmentation and dissolution of the world into warring nations and ethnic groups, a bloody process which continues resolutely and tragically in the present?
