Indebtedness among historians is a peculiar thing, however. We don’t simply, in mechanical fashion, inherit a body of knowledge, add something to it, and pass it on. We also question, test, and shake here and there the intellectual scaffolding surrounding our predecessors’ work, in the full, ironic knowledge that someone else is going to come along and give the scaffolding surrounding our own work a good shake, too, that no historian, in short, is ever permitted the final word.
Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past
china, historiography, history