ABSTRACT
As long as there has been history, there have been those who opposed or denied history. The English poet Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) wrote of “that huge Mississippi of falsehood called history.” Stephen Daedelus in Irish novelist James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man called history “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” History is a basically rational enterprise. Thus, the currents of irrationality that flooded Europe in the twentieth century also inundated the historical profession. The central threats to those who sought to tell the truth about history were excessive idealism and relativism.
