Opening paragraphs.............(History itsownself)

History is what survives.  Memories and documents, buildings and roads, images and ceremonies, artifacts, tree rings, furniture, clothes, corpses, and fossils - all are caught in a web of meaning and interpretation, which is our understanding of the past.  But much of the understanding contains great gaps because of the inadequacy or disappearance of these raw materials of history.  And so, much of what we think of  as history is a matter of educated assumption at best;  at worst, wild surmise.  A dedicated biographer tries with all his strength to achieve the first and avoid, even abjure, the second, in hopes of writing a real approximation of his subject's true life.
-Vincent Curcio, from the Introduction to Chrysler:  The Life and Times of an Automotive Genius