ABSTRACT
Historians both ‘herd intellectually’ as well as ‘work independently’ to ‘figure out the true nature of the past’, and all historians have various beliefs about ‘the nature of turning the past’ into history. More often than not, historians work in varying degrees of solitariness. However, at some point all historians will become factional by choosing to belong to a clique or coterie in terms of their historical interests and/or in terms of political ideology. Thus, the past is always shaped, and its meaning wrought, by the reality of the past, and there is always an unavoidable intervention of dissident and dissenter historians. Unfortunately, in the obscure world of the now nonexistent past, historians usually claim to have discovered ‘the history’. The past cannot be resurrected for what it was. All that historians (and everyone else) can do is resuscitate and/or review the past when it has been turned into a ‘history’. It has to be clear to both the historian and their consumer that ‘the historical past’ has unavoidably been assigned ‘meanings’ and ‘explanations’ by historians (and everyone else), that there are numberless and preferred narratives of the past as authored into existence.
