Most people are content to leave the spadework to historians and to make their own sense from the books those scholars write. Unfortunately, books, too, have their limits. Any author knows how much must be eliminated before a text is ready for printing, and any researcher knows how little can be explored in the archives before the text is written. The manuscripts seem to stretch into infinity. You open a box, take out a folder, open the folder, take out a letter, read the letter, and wonder what connects it with all the other letters in all the other folders in all the other boxes in all the other archives.
Researchers have never even read the overwhelming majority of documents such as letters.
Most people never wrote letters. Most human beings have vanished into the past without leaving a trace of their existence. To write history from the archives is to piece together what little we can grasp in as meaningful a picture as we can compose. But the result, in the form of a history book, can no more capture the infinity of experience than Augustine could comprehend the mind of God. In short, the traditional media have no greater claim to mastery of the past than the electronic media.