Quotes About Historians

Under Freud's influence, many ambitious biographers - not to mention psychologists, philosophers, and historians - have sought answers in their subject's childhood.

Social media might one day offer a dazzling, and even overwhelming, array of source material for historians.

Most historians and other writers of what we now consider 'primary sources' simply didn't think about women and their contribution to society. They took it for granted, except when that contribution or its lack directly affected men.

Historians and journalists always have agendas, but if I want to find out what's going on in South Africa, I read Nadine Gordimer or John Coetzee because they offer novelistic truth.

Historians should stay away from chaos theory and the difficulties of reverse engineering except to discuss general properties of the world and learn the limits of what they can't know.

many historians looking at the record have been taken aback by the swiftness of the change.

In the western United States, the geographer Thomas R. Vale wrote in 2002, the "modest" Indian population "modified only a tiny fraction of the total landscape for their everyday living needs." Vale is in the minority now. Spurred in part by historians like Cronon, most scientists have changed their minds about Indian fire.

Throughout all of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, nationalism was ascendant, and historians identified history with nations, rather than with cultures, religions, or ways of life.

Historians provide many reasons for this extraordinary transition, high among them the fierce opposition of slaves themselves. But another important cause is that abolitionists convinced people around the world that slavery was a moral disaster. An institution fundamental to human society for millennia was made over by ideas and a call to action, loudly repeated.

version of the story. One particular incident in the battle troubled me a lot. Several historians describe how the African victors, having conquered the town, indulged in a cannibal feast in the burning

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.

All historians, even the most scientific, have bias, if in no other sense than the determination not to have any.

historians rarely emphasize the tremendous importance that [Marie Antoinette's] public attached to what she was wearing at each step along the way.

History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic - e.g., the ever-growing production of biographies of women is helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians.

The wisdom of hindsight, so useful to historians and indeed to authors of memoirs, is sadly denied to practicing politicians.

Historians and critics too often overlook the state of mind of the commanders in judging a military or naval action.

I've said before that I am not a historian and that when it comes to speaking of the dimensions of the Holocaust, it is the historians that should reflect on it.

All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.

The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ. It is the story at the very heart of modern history. It is perhaps the most challenging riddle historians have to solve. And we should solve it not merely to satisfy our curiosity. For it is only by identifying the true causes of Western ascendancy that we can hope to estimate with any degree of accuracy the imminence of our decline and fall.

Many historians still tend to assume that the spread of an idea or an ideology is a function of its inherent content in relation to some vaguely specified context. We must now acknowledge, however, that some ideas go viral because of structural features of the network through which they spread. They are least likely to do so in a hierarchical, top-down network, where horizontal peer-to-peer links are prohibited.

Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even trying to) establish universal laws of social or political physics with reliable predictive powers. Why? Because there is no possibility of repeating the single, multi-millennium experiment that constant to the past. The sample size of human history is one.

Men always praise antiquity and fault the present, although not always reasonably, and they are partisans of things past such that not only do they celebrate those ages that they know from what historians have preserved of them, but also those that as old men they recall having seen in their youth. And if this opinion of theirs is false, as it is most of the time, I am persuaded that there are various causes that lead them into this deception.