“Historians become controversial when they do not perpetuate myths, when they do not transmit the received and conventional wisdom, when they challenge the comforting presence of a stabilized past. Members of a society, and its politicians in particular, prefer that historians be quietly ironic rather than polemical, conservators rather than innovators.”

cited in Linenthal, Edward Tabor, and Tom Engelhardt. History Wars : The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Co., 1996), 60.