ABSTRACT
Historians are professionally inclined to look over their shoulders. It is not just that they have to be wary about the daggers out to stab them in the back, it is also the fact that their trade deals in a posteriori explanations. Looking backward is in the nature of the practice of their profession. The search for origins and causes is hard-wired into the very systems of their methodologies. Thus they take great epoch-making turning points, such as the First World War of the twentieth century, and seek to establish the roots of such transformatory events. They not only set out to develop theories based on deductions from past facts, they are constantly thinking in terms of origins, of sources – sources as in rivers rather than documents – that lead to the great flows of history. This often leads them to deal in what become myths of origin that colour the writing of their histories.
