...but I struggle a bit with his advice:
"Without presenting the past in the correct context of its own time, and somehow disengaging it from one’s present—without grasping the past as the present it once was—one can never understand what really happened or how that distant past changed into a later present and, eventually, into the present that we are ourselves are experiencing."
-Bernard Bailyn
It’s hard to ignore the present in working to interpret the past . . .