information missing

human history is a delightfully vague thing. i enjoy thinking about when eras and situational titles start and end. for example, what is an immigrant in america. white people are all imported from elsewhere, but we have been here long enough to be called native. native americans might not agree, but then again, they had to come from somewhere. a burden of our generation, that no previous generation has had to deal with, is the incredible pace of change and amount of information available on an instance. it used to be that history was something studied in hindsight, but not anymore. maybe that's not entirely true. maybe there is a new area of history that's been created. current history, where all the information on hand is studied and analyzed and conclusion drawn. then there is actual history, where the consequences of actions and decisions have had time to play out.