It is worth starting with visions, though, because they establish hopes and fears. History then determines which prevail.

As my former Yale colleague Rogers Smith has put it: "Elegance is not worth that price.

I expressed skepticism, in the first chapter, about the utility of time machines in historical research. I especially advised against graduate students relying on them, because of the limited perspective you tend to get from being plunked down in some particular part of the past, and the danger of not getting back in time for your orals.

Revisionism is a healthy historiographical process, and no one, not even revisionists, should be exempt from it.