Archival agility : some preliminary observations

History does not stand still. Historians in the 21st Century ask questions of the past"”and reach at least preliminary answers"”that had not even occurred to an earlier generation. To borrow the words of Harvard historian Akira Iriye, there has been, in recent decades, a "significant new development in the way in which historians conceptualize and seek to understand the past."1 Among the few disciplinary constants is the primacy of the primary source, even if each individual historian's choice of research materials is locked in a mutual embrace with the questions that they are asking.