End of History?

When tomorrow’s historians go to write the chronicles of decision-making that led to Gulf War II, they may be startled to find there’s not much history to be written. The same is true of Clinton’s war over Kosovo, Bush Sr.’s Desert Storm, and a host of other major episodes of U.S. national security policy. Many of the kinds of documents that historians of prior wars, and of the Cold War, have taken for granted—memoranda, minutes, and the routine back-and-forth among assistant secretaries of state and defense or among colonels and generals in the Joint Chiefs of Staff—simply no longer exist.
The problem is not some deliberate plot to conceal or destroy evidence. The problem—and it may seem churlish to say so in an online publication—is the advent of e-mail.
Read more of Fred Kaplan’s article “How e-mail is wrecking our national archive” here.

---

---