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Associate Professor Samuel Boyd recently edited a special issue of English Language Notes, which also includes his article "".��

History is both everywhere and nowhere. It is omnipresent in the sense that time creates a past, a reality (often in the form of decay) for all things as the earth rotates around the sun. This ever-present reality of history cultivates a sense of its enduring relevance and thus encourages the observation of patterns, even if the nature of those patterns is difficult to discern. In this fashion, Mark Twain once pithily opined that “history never repeats itself, but the kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legend.”¹ That sense of familiar circumstances and responses in different places and eras to history invites the idea of comparison: How do societies and cultures reflect on the notion of the past? Such reconstruction of the “broken fragments of antique legend” involves not only perceptions of how history functions but also...