Things happen. Objects testify.
Historians put incidents and things into temporal perspective by defining the frames that render meaning in history — and to history.
“People make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances of their own choosing, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And even when they seem to be engaged in overturning themselves and all things, in creating something never before seen, it is precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis that they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to serve them, borrowing from them names, battle cries, and costumes, so that, in this venerable disguise and with this borrowed language, they may stage the new scene of world history.”
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Karl Marx: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Quoted from: MEW vol. 8, p. 115.
Published under Creative Commons by Z Thomas