Written by Michel-Rolph Trouillot in 1995, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History is a widely cited (more than 11,000 citations as of this post) critique of representation in history. The book brings power to the fore of history, which is often assumed to be apolitical or unbiased. The author passed away in 2012, before which he was a professor at the University of Chicago, an anthropologist by training. A couple of quotes from this book:

“Silences are inherent in history because any single event enters history with some of its constituting parts missing. Something is always left out while something else is recorded. There is no perfect closure of any event, however one chooses to define the boundaries of that event. Thus whatever becomes fact does so with its own inborn absences, specific to its production. In other words, the very mechanisms that make any historical recording possible also insure that historical facts are not created equal. They reflect different of the means of historical production at the very first engraving that transforms an event into a fact. Silences of this kind show the limits of strategies that imply a more accurate reconstruction of the past, and therefore the production of a “better” history, simply by an enlargement of the empirical base.” (p. 49)

“Effective silencing does not require a conspiracy, not even a political consensus. Its roots are structural. Beyond a stated—and most often sincere—political generosity, best described in U.S. parlance within a liberal continuum, the narrative structures of Western historiography have not broken with the ontological order of the Renaissance. This exercise of power is much more important than the alleged conservative or liberal adherence of the historians involved.” (p. 106)