Sources of signification

…I learned that history implies extracting meaning, including political meaning, from both collective and individual experiences. History can be the interpretation of human change over time in a given society. But history, […] is also a critical and restrained attempt at disclosing the source of signification that made this past real, sometimes too real, to its contemporaries and to us, its interpeters.

Federico Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919-1945, (Duke University Press, 2010), 3.