Conclusion
Keyword(s):
In his introduction to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s cogent critique of excessive US Government secrecy, FBI historian Richard Gid Powers wrote: ‘If official secrecy had a devastating impact on American history, its impact on Americans’ understanding of that history was a collateral disaster.’1 From the very beginnings of history as a professional discipline in the nineteenth century, indeed, since the time of the ancients and the first known works of source-based historical narrative by Herodotus and Thucydides, history has always existed, as Lynn Hunt put it, ‘in a symbiotic relationship with nationalism’....