In his introduction to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's cogent critique of excessive US Government secrecy, FBI historian Richard Gid Powers wrote: ‘If official secrecy had a devastating impact on American history, its impact on Americans’ understanding of that history was a collateral disaster.’ From the very beginnings of history as a professional discipline in the nineteenth century, indeed, since the time of the ancients and the first known works of source-based historical narrative by Herodotus and Thucydides, history has always existed, as Lynn Hunt put it, ‘in a symbiotic relationship with nationalism’. In this sense, the function of history was to provide unifying and guiding stories of our collective past that may bind us up in a national community. In so doing, these stories not only buttressed the authority of the nation state, and of our national leaders, by entrenching their lineage, but also gave us, the citizens of that national community, a sense of our common destiny. In the United States, a young nation of colonising immigrants and dispersed communities with different customs, creeds, languages and ethnicities, such unifying stories of a shared national past and manifest future were all the more needed. ‘The story of the nation's rise provided the common threads to bind together disparate peoples, whether of different ethnic groups, different classes, or different regions.’

Along with nationalism there was another tradition of the nineteenth century within which the historical profession took root: positivism. This was especially the case in the United States where the German idealism of Leopold Von Ranke was misappropriated as the basis of a new ‘scientific’ approach to history. The adoption of the scientific method, with its attendant advocacy of empiricism, led to the exaltation of the archive, which provided the firm empirical ground upon which the newly professionalised historians could apply Ranke's rigorous philological and documentary methods. Thus, since governments were the most meticulous record-keepers, and since the nation-state was, until the 1960s, the prevailing subject of interest for the historian, the bureaucratic records of the national government found in the national archives so exalted by 13 Rue Madeleine's opening scene, became the mainspring of history. Even in the nineteenth century American historians were never so naïve as to take everything they found in the national archive, or every politicians’ speech and official utterance, at face value.