A House Redivided

We often take history as a fixed and permanent, a series of narratives built from obvious origins and leading to inevitable conclusions. History is told to us in the voice of its time, and thus we consider the wars of Greece through the voice of Homer, or the American Revolution in the language of the Declaration of Independance, or the Civil War in the words of Lincoln.

Harvey Loves Harvey proposes, however, that history is not bound to the vernacular of the past, and that strong comparisons can be made between the debates and events of a previous time with those of our own. The barrier, it often seems, is the language with which we present the past, and that it does not fit with the new vernacular.

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