Resumen de Confessions of an Accidental (or Perhaps Overdetermined) Historian
To begin with, historians typically believe that we can more or less understand the past without having been there or having talked to somebody who was. Members of the profession who believe that historians should spread the true faith, uplift the masses, or defend intellectual standards in an age of grunge culture may be appalled by this analogy, especially if they find modern art boring, dangerous, or incomprehensible. American historians have become so concerned with methodological problems associated with literary criticism that they pay insufficient attention to equally valuable ideas available from economists, sociologists, and political scientists. Most historians share both special ways of thinking about the past and unusual respect for what historian Warren Susrnan called the "past-ness of the past" that is absent from most other people, and understandably so. Although standard histories of the era suggest otherwise, everyday life continued during the sixties.
