The use of machine learning to garner insights about the future is one of the benefits of the technology most oft cited by enterprise. For historians, however, its true potential lies in its ability to reveal new things the past - potential that is now being realized on a massive scale. There have been a number of projects conducted by historians in recent years that have leveraged data analytics. Real Clear Politics, for example, applied text mining tools to 34 years of state of the union addresses, starting with Ronald Reagan in 1981, to analyze their political tone. They looked at the language used to chart each speech ideologically (on a left-right political scale) based on its content.