“It is this process of emptying history of meaning that has produced pop-cultural historians who aim to protect history from the present, rather than the present from history. As fantastic as these historians and their fictional realms are, there is something familiar about the problems they address. Our own personal histories are now documented and distributed with a thoroughness and rapidity that we would never have thought possible. Facts (alternative and not) reach us with startling speed and regularity. But whether all of this data ever amounts to anything more than fashion, meaningless shifts in affect and style, seems still to be an open question”