In her bestseller, From These Truths: A History of the United States, Jill Lepore suggests no one can know a nation as far back as 1787, “with or without baby teeth kept in a far. But studying history is like that, looking into one face and seeing behind it another, face after face after face. ‘Know whence you came,’ [James] Baldwin told his nephew.  The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden. It can’t be shirked. You carry it everywhere. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it.”

William Faulkner offers this perspective: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”