Historians can’t simply tell us how things were, or how they are, because, as Alun Munslow puts it, all ‘meaning is generated by socially encoded and constructed discursive practices that mediate reality so much that they effectively close off direct access to it’. History is therefore at base just another more or less socially acceptable narrative, competing for our attention and our assent; just another way of putting things, which will survive, or not, through a process of discussion and debate. What is more, its elaborate causal constructions and explanations are essentially put together
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