To the Editor:
History is limited to the period in which our predecessors wrote accounts of their times in the local language of the times. Prehistory is the period of time before our forebears had the written word with which to make records.

We may glean information, and make inferences, from the pictures that our ancient fathers and mothers left us, and perhaps they are “writing” of a kind. But those pictures are too open to interpretation to truly be considered as “words.”

Written records are more valuable, but these must be understood in terms of the times in which they were written. Even here, in our own local area, our lives have changed in dramatic, and subtler, ways as any younger person might demonstrate when asked to use a rotary telephone.

Our tastes seem to drive much change, as do unforeseen events. Recall the original diet soda, Tab, which is no longer, and the former passenger train from Altamont to Albany.

Our standards of what is news even evolve over time: Who can forget the concern, when “Thomas S. Foley, the House Speaker, and George L. Mitchell, the Senate Democratic Leader, said they had designated the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to supervise the separate but coordinated inquiries” regarding allegations of illegal behavior by a United States president that were “both persistent and disturbing,” the two leaders said in a joint statement. “We have no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing, but the seriousness of the allegations, and the weight of the circumstantial information, compel and effort to establish the facts.”

Current events will soon be history, and future students of history will either have honest accounts of the past, by the people who lived then, or they will have accounts that Joseph Stalin termed “falsifiers of history” in his propaganda of the same title.

Historians, journalists, and ordinary people have to protect history from those who wish to falsify it, even those who falsify history by refusing to acknowledge it.

Edgar Tolmie

Altamont