ABSTRACT
‘The past’ is what we habitually refer to be ‘the history’. Paradoxically and probably inappropriately, there is a constant hindrance with this notion—the fabricated—that cannot be resolved. The perpetual problem with ‘doing history’ is the unavoidable distinction between the historian’s ‘representation’ and/or ‘description’ of the reality of the past. Cleary, there is no prepackaged history through which historians or anyone else can disinter and recover along with everyone else. Ironically, there are no past histories that can be exhumed. The reason for this exhumation situation in the time before the present is that the perpetual present can only institute ‘the past’ through that simulated replacement of ‘the history’. The fundamental and extensive problem that all historians have is their perpetual failure to distinguish their ‘present representation’ from ‘past reality’. To be clear then—and like every other human being—historians can only engage with the past as a history even though its representational accuracy may be dubious. This, of course, is extremely fortunate and providential because all histories are differentially construed. For all historians, then, the irony in ‘doing history’ is that both histories and the past must, somehow, coexist.
