I can remember the moment I decided I was done with history. It was probably in early high school, and I was researching an incident where a union supporter had been killed by a local veteran’s organization. The conflict had produced two directly contradictory narrative of events, one from the union supporters, one from their opponents; nothing else remained to provide some outsider perspective.

History had always been my favorite subject, with its narrative sweep and storybook feel. But I found this wildly frustrating — sources contradicted themselves, or were biased, or were missing. Nothing could be known, nothing was uncontested. What then was the point? I certainly continued learning about history after that, but never pursued it academically; never took a history department course in college.

As an adult, I’ve returned to history as a hobbyist. Much of it has been a semi-professional interest in American history, particularly the history of political and social movements — as a journalist this history is often quite relevant. Recently though, and as occasionally documented on this blog, I’ve pursued quite a different autodidactic track, delving into the medieval history of Europe, Africa and Western Asia. This was prompted in part by a realization there were significant gaps in my knowledge of what people were doing for most of recorded time. What were residents of the Sahel doing in 1325, anyway? What about all those Visigoths, once they had finished raiding Rome? I, embarrassingly, had very little idea.

Much of this history — “The Inheritance of Rome,” “The Golden Rhinoceros,” “African Dominion,” “The Bright Ages” — is fragmentary at best. Handfuls of coins, outsider travelogues, scraps of writing; from these entire cities are summoned from the past or in some cases not summoned at all (“Inheritance of Rome” has one stunning line where several decades of history in part of Italy is glossed over because apparently nothing survived to tell us what was happening).

One of my favorite works has been “Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa,” which serves as a catalog and accompaniment of a museum exhibit, a collection of scholarly articles, an art book, and more. The book not only acknowledges but embraces the fragmentary historical record. Many of the photos in the book are of shards of potter or scraps of cloth, when these are not available contemporary objects stand in for what historical precedents might have looked like. Most of the book is micro-focused academic essays digging a single process of gold manufacture or a few words in Arabic. To frame this assemblage of history, the book opens with an essay not by an archeologist, but a creative writer; reflecting on the nature of fragments.

Here is history that is joyfully without certainty. Glimpsing a shard from a world that is unknowable to us but unquestionably existed in all the full glory of human experience is frustrating; but it is exhilarating too. Amidst a fog of lost history, any sharp image, no matter how small, feels like a revelation.