Dreams and Play: Historical Method and Methodology (Connors)

And so the two questions that are continually argued about in historical writing are these:

(1) Does this interpretation of the historical data seem coherent, reliable, interesting, useful? and (2) What can this interpretation of the past show us about the present and the future? (p. 30 in Methods and Methodology in Composition Research)

Because that is what history is: the telling of stories about the tribe that make the tribe real. That is why the recovery of composition history after it had been lost for 150 years is so important. Finally, we are telling the stories of our father and our mothers, and we are legitimating ourselves through legitimating them. (34-35)

But our motives for writing history are what such motives have always been: we write histories to define ourselves on the stage of time. (35)

History nearly always begins as simple curiosity about how we got here. (p # ?)