The verifiability for which the historian strives, and which appeared at first in the nineteenth century to be the great triumph of history as opposed to speculation, always retains something disputable about it, an element of reconstruction, of interpretation and ambiguity, so that, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, history reached a crisis and the historical approach with its proud claim to knowledge became open to question. It grew clearer and clearer that there is no such thing as the pure fact and its unshakable certainty, that even the fact is subject to interpretation
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