The test of a historian's life is whether he or she can ask and answer questions, especially "what if" questions, about the matters of passionate significance to themselves and the world, as though they were journalists reporting things long past -- and yet, not as a stranger but as one deeply involved. These are not questions about real history, which is not about what we might like, but about what happened, and could perhaps have happened otherwise but did not. They are questions about the present not the past, which is why they are important to those who live at the start of the new century, old or young. (查看原文)
