Cultures reside in formal institutions designed for their preservation. Whether those are newspapers or universities or secondary schools or church congregations or seminaries or legal systems, they are all self conscious about the need to protect the past by finding ways in which it relates to the present. The United States Supreme Court defends and protects the Constitution of the United States by giving it often quite controversial interpretations, just as English professors defend and protect the canon of great literature by finding new interpretations for old texts, by understanding how the texts fit into their own time and place, and by making room for new texts, so that American literature anthologies now include a number of African American writers.