It is well known that the July 14, 1789, entry in Louis XVI's diary is “Rien.” He did not mean the word as a philosophical statement. Louis just thought that nothing much had happened on that day. Of course we may disagree, and those disagreements are often the stuff of history and history writing. Crane is at her best when she is being a historian—that is, when she understands the phrase “nothing happened” as implying that “most of the past is Nothing until we notice it.” Unfortunately, she also succumbs on occasion to the temptation of extracting philosophical mileage from her concept of choice, thus waxing quasiphilosophical about “Nothing” and “historical consciousness.” On those occasions, she becomes mincemeat for the likes of Parmenides and Heidegger. As another unphilosophically minded monarch once remarked, “Nothing can come of nothing.”

That historians “don't usually spend a lot of time talking about what didn't...

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