ABSTRACT
‘Doing history’ is an examination of that which is nonexistent—the past. Hence, all histories are factious. So, ‘the historical past’ is never adequately ‘refreshed’, ‘revivified’, and/or ‘rehabilitated’ as/or through the historian’s preferred narrative (aka history). So, no ‘historical past’ that has been ‘produced’ or ‘articulated’ and/or ‘danced and/or built’ can seriously insist to be ‘the past’ because no individual history—regardless of its form can claim to be the past ‘resurrected as it actually was’. The supreme irony in doing history, then, is that the past can only be a substitute (in whatever form the historian wants) because it is the historian’s narrative creation even if it is claimed to be the past as it actually was. Hence, no history that anyone can create will be an accurate substitute for the past. Obviously, of course, we can know what happened in the past, more or less, and that is what historians do.
