ABSTRACT
Take any event, process, or fact and place it in history. Once done everything changes, since that event, process, or fact, gains the context of time, location, and movement. In other words, place something in history and it becomes possible to see it as history; history opens the door to contingency. All historical writing involves an interpretive dimension, since we can never be sure that we have comprehended the horizontal context in which the object of study occurred. The past is always there, but the activity of the present, including that of the historian, works upon it. Man is a symbolising creature. We cannot transcend the symbolic realm, and history is a discipline undertaken by those with particular foci and projects; further, the objects of historical study are past symbolic activities. History is the history of previous, meaningful being, and historians are themselves products of history (Burrow, 2007).
