specialists. (That’s a perception that we academic historians have too often fostered, by the way.) But if we are all already historians who know some history, it doesn’t follow that we are automatically equipped to remember the past accurately and wisely. The analogy between history and memory points us toward this final conclusion as well. Remember how faulty memory can be? There is an old Asian proverb to the effect that the palest ink is more reliable than the strongest memory.6 Academic historians