Re: "wie es eigentlich gewesen," per[Leopold von Ranke or "the events which happened in the past" per Thucydides?

Historians have not simply shown the past "wie es eigentlich gewesen," as [Leopold von] Ranke insisted they should, nor have they shown clearly "the events which happened in the past," as Thucydides claimed to do. [Rather,] historians have almost always smuggled themselves into their accounts, either explicitly by presenting philosophies of history or implicitly by providing coherence through narratives calculated to provide coherence. . . . Through a combination of imagination, technology, and diligence, historians have compiled hard data that now make impossible some versions of the past that once passed as truth. Only within this realm of the verifiable can competing interpretations survive the scrutiny of the community of professional historians. Kloppenberg, Objectivity and Historicism: A Century of American Historical Writing, 94 AM. HIST. REV. 1011, 1029 (1989).