Historians have long believed that history does not consist simply of recounting the past according to the Rankean ideal of telling it “as it really was.” The process of researching, selecting, and emplotting historical evidence within a narrative structure is often idiosyncratic, and may be employed to further a host of goals. Within communities, history represents a way of appropriating the past in order to serve the needs of the present. Maurice Halbwachs’s work emphasizes the role history plays as the “collective memory” of a community. Halbwachs argues that “no memory is possible outside frameworks used by the people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections.” This process involves the retention of useful historical emplotment points coupled with the suppression of those “facts” which threaten to undermine a community’s structures.