All presidents are subject to the tides of revisionist history, their legacies constantly in flux.
America has been erased like a blackboard, only to be rebuilt and then erased again. But baseball has marked time while America has rolled by like a procession of steamrollers.
All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities for life. Change is the one constant in human history.
Men live in history as never before …. we make and change history minute by minute. History is not the book or the human memory. We do history in the morning and change it after lunch.
Empires being neither up nor down do not fall. They change their appearance.
… history itself appears to be abandoning the eruption of events in favor of stable structures
History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils.
Not one country in existence today has had the same borders and government for as long as two hundred years. The world will continue changing.
These are matters of external history. They are indeed prominent objects, often changing and giving a new direction to the current; but they tell us not why it flows onward and will ever flow.
Nowhere is it ordained that history moves in a straight line.
