> Historians often rely on new discoveries in order to make breakthroughs. Every now and again, a fresh document, a set of papers or a whole manuscript is found

> Historians often rely on new discoveries in order to make breakthroughs. Every now and again, a fresh document, a set of papers or a whole manuscript is found by chance. Just right off, that's not true. I don't have much objection about the rest of the article. It's a topic like CRT that any modern history education is going to touch on as students finish with baseline skills and move to a more research understanding. Anyone who's been an academic/museum setting knows there's warehouses of unstudied objects to catalog and analyze. It's just boring. Maybe historians are waiting for something exciting, but the small group of object/primary resource studying historians have plenty to work on right now. History is not static, so many historians focus on re-contextualizing what has "already been studied". This the important meta work that helps to ensure theories and models are always up-to-date. It's similar to math in this regard where finding a new proof to a well-established theorem can be groundbreaking [1]. In history, there are have new translations of The Odyssey that change how a novel that has been taught hundreds of years is seen [2]. A good historian would also point out how these two developments are more closely related than people think -- namely, look what happens when diverse viewpoints are introduced into a well established field of study! 1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/24/new-orleans-pythagoras-theorem-trigonometry-prove https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/24/new-orleans-... 2. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/08/the-odyssey-translated-emily-wilson-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/08/the-odyssey-tr...