> As a result, we generally severely underestimate historical peoples, because there's just too much stuff there to get to know it all. We're constantly reifyin

> As a result, we generally severely underestimate historical peoples, because there's just too much stuff there to get to know it all. We're constantly reifying facts and narrative to fit extremely complex events. We have to do it to our own lives, and the lives of the people around us, yet even the people we know the most intimately have vast swaths of their inner lives that you will never be able to fathom. One of the most difficult tasks of a historian is to recover the possibilities latent in the past. This is perhaps even more difficult than ascertaining what did occur.