In olden days, the historian specialized in knowledge and access. He knew languages through years of study, carried multi-stamped passports with him as so many badges of honor, thumbed through moldy manuscripts untouched for hundreds of years...and, at last, he constructed an account of what happened.
The internet takes such a figure and transmutes him into a fool. Language is easy. Sources are available. What happened is a matter of public debate, not of private authority. What is left to the historian is an interpretive patchwork. No longer does access to rare stones draw readers to a work; rather, the method of arranging common materials is what the art must be redefined to be.
Forced to artistry, the historian is left looking backwards for guidance as to how history should be written. What was often an idle question to predecessors becomes the foundation stone of future study, and the old question of historicism takes on a new meaning.
Regardless of whether or not the study of history allows for accurate projections about the future, the manner in which history is interpreted and understood surely is used to influence thought and policy. But historians are no longer the gatekeepers to historical sources and the histories they tell, and it is unclear if the writers of histories should still be considered historians. Historians are not only authors of histories, but experts in the interpretation of historical sources. History as an academic subject must change accordingly: from the study of what has happened to the study of what has been interpreted to have occurred.
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