Is history "made"? Do we "write" it? Or is it "crafted"? Histories that venerate individuals and events suggest that, with enough determination, history can be made. Others that attend to epistemic shifts and collective mentalites privilege the exigencies of texts themselves-their writing and reception. In today's bewildering age of political sectarianism and alternative facts, "History" has become the site of a new war, understood not as something that can be reexamined but something to be owned. Whereas public controversies like the one over The 1619 Project by The New York Times Magazine in the United States have largely focused on who gets to interpret events, in the academy the question has been framed as a problem of epistemological legacy, with legacy referring to the inscription of a hard-to-move infrastructure of knowledge production. Canons are suspended and decolo-nial methodologies are set in place to reintroduce the people and points of view that were excluded, often intentionally, from history's making and writing.
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