A historian said he is obligated to tell the truth, even if it is ugly, to make sense of things for himself and others, as a service, a moral call. How can this making-sense be compatible with the kind of truth-telling he means? The act of making-sense is quite literally a manufacture, a creation for sense-apprehension, it is pulling from undifferentiated space with the tools endowed by curiosity, fear, joy, sadness, and anger, and carefully hoisting onto a platform, set free from the debris that would obscure the way to hosting and nurturing that feeling for as long as we can.
To show something, is it necessary to contrast it with something else, to disentangle it?
Female Background would be called history if it partook of time instead of space; it has no past.