Power does not shape the past only once, at the final telling; it enters at different times and from different angles. It decides which facts get recorded at all, which get kept in archives, which get woven into stories, and which later get treated as significant. So the bias of a history begins at the source, before anyone writes a word.
Gaps in the record are not just accidents of time; someone silences a fact or a person the way a silencer silences a gun. Some silences are deliberate and some unconscious, but every mention and every omission is an act. Every account of an event is recorded with some of its parts missing, and what gets left out reveals who held power.
A powerful figure can wipe out a rival twice: first by killing him, then by attaching his name to something else, like a famous building. Every later mention of the building then buries the man, his aims, and his achievements, removing him from both the past and the future.
Archives are not neutral storehouses; they are institutions that organize facts and sources and so set the limits of which historical statements are even possible. Talk about the past is less about recovering what happened than about present-day techniques that limit what in the record will count as the past. Every source holds a position in this contest.
When an event breaks the basic assumptions of the people watching it, even the most radical of them may have no framework to grasp it, so they cannot record or understand it as it happens. A successful revolt by enslaved people was such a fact: its own era could not conceive of it, and later histories kept downplaying it.