The novelist Sandra Cisneros has a good grip on historical process

“If we understand that history is a continuum, then we can appreciate what came before and how it transforms us and becomes who we are.”

-Sandra Cisneros, "The Myth Buster," Texas Monthly 81 (Dec. 2019)

My final law-practice article is out in print

Happily, my last law article is now in print (post-retirement from law practice, I solely focus on history, legal history in particular).

The law article is titled "'Even If a Party Has a Change of Heart': A Proposed Framework for Enforcement of Courthouse-Steps Settlements in Cases and Proceedings in the Texas Bankruptcy Courts," 52 Tex. Tech L. Rev. 199 (2020).
 

Per Frankfurther, the role of documents in writing history

"The dictum that history cannot be written without documents is less than a half-truth if it implies that it can be written from them [alone]."


Felix Frankfurter, Mr. Justice Roberts, 104 U. Pa. L.R. 311 (1955).

Sayings about history by Becker and Maitland

In 1974, the now-deceased historian named Ferenc M. Szasz published a two-part article, “The Many Meanings of History,” in Vol. 7 of The History Teacher. Of the numerous sayings about history collected by Prof. Szasz, a couple of those aphorisms sen germane to my project of writing the biography of Hatton Sumners:
—->“History is the memory of things said and done.”
-Carl L. Becker (American historian, 1873-1945)
—->“It is very hard to remember that events now long in the past were once in the future.”
-Frederic William Maitland (British historian, 1850-1906)

In my archival research I’m seeking to recover and experience derivatively “the things [the subject] said and d[id]. 
And I’m trying to bear in mind the contingency of all the events along his timeline I’m creating, that is, that he did not know or anticipate everything that followed each event and each step he took.