truncating the antecedents
March 18th, 2008 by 
bkmarcus
Robert Higgs writes:
Whereas historians obsessively trace every event's causal lineage further and further into the past, nonhistorians tend toward the opposite extreme: they assume in effect that the world began immediately before the event they have in mind. I call this unfortunate tendency "truncating the antecedents." Among the general public, it has given rise to mistaken interpretations of historical causation in cases too numerous to mention, and mistakes of this sort continue to occur frequently, in part because politicians and other conniving parties have an interest in propagating them.
– "Truncating the Antecedents: How Americans Have Been Misled about World War II
