> [!quote] The role of "metahistorical" national myths in historical studies (page 10) > By the same token, this book does not dwell on the great nineteenth-century national schemes of history that organize so much historical discussion in our own day. Poles, for example, colloquially refer to the early modern Common- wealth as “Polish,” meaning that it was something like a modern Polish state. Russians imagine that the centuries that East Slavic lands spent within the Commonwealth are a meaningless prelude to their “reunification” with Russia. *These views are metahistorical, a long word that here means “not even wrong.”* Their popularity inspires their opponents to turn them on their heads: Lithuanians can “demonstrate” that medieval Vilnius was not Polish but Lithuanian, or Ukrainians can “prove” that they, not Russia, inherited Kyivan civilization. *To argue with metahistory risks accepting its rules of engagement: and nonsense turned on its head remains nonsense.* There are no syntheses to be found there, only theses and antitheses. Dialectics of myth and metahistory sharpen the minds of nationalists, and are thus properly *a subject rather than a method of national history*. > [!quote] Critical learning as the rupture of conventional wisdom (page 12) > Conventional wisdom is like a sheet of ice, covering the dark sea of the undiscovered. Does the narrative flow like water over the smooth surface? Water takes the path of least resistance, yielding to gravity and then to the cold. It seals promising cracks as it freezes, in the end adding its own mass to the ice. It proves to be of the same matter as that with which it deals. > > Or does the narrative move like an icebreaker: sailing under its own power, identifying problems, and confronting them? Is it sharp in front, does it welcome hard weather, can it survive heavy blows? Does it leave in its wake a view of the deep, a black line through white ice, a passage that others may follow?