Quotes About Historians

One of the ultimate challenges of biology is to understand how the brain becomes consciously aware of perception, experience and emotion. But it is equally conceivable that the exchange would be useful for the beholders of art, for people who enjoy art, for historians, and for the artists themselves.

Presidential legacies are valuable things, too valuable to be left up to historians.

They explain the new by the old—and the old they explain by the older still, like those historians who turn a Lenin into a Russian Robespierre, and a Robespierre into a French Cromwell: when all is said and done, they have never understood anything at all.

The general consensus among historians, among the ones who can handle the fact that 'Lincoln' is, in fact, historical fiction, is that we demonstrate enormous fidelity to history and that, beyond that, we've actually contributed a line of thinking about Lincoln's presidency that's somewhat original.

FDR misjudgment, one frequently ignored by historians: the president's refusal to concede Soviet culpability in the Katyn Wood massacre, one of the worst war crimes of the twentieth century.

When we're interested in something, everything around us appears to refer to it (the mystics call these phenomena 'signs', the sceptics 'coincidence', and psychologists 'concentrated focus', although I've yet to find out what term historians would use).

Or they laughed at Indiana, because the people there proudly call themselves Hoosiers even though they have no idea what Hoosier means. Some historians believe it comes from the Shawnee expression "ho'o-sa'ars," or "people who cannot explain their nickname." - from Best. State. Ever.: A Florida Man Defends His Homeland

So poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their "oeuvres.

He did much to keep different groups of Franciscans together, one of the many reasons that have led a majority of Franciscan historians to regard Bonaventure's generalate as a blessing in which his moderation saved the order from chaos.47 For those who are inclined to doubt this view, it is important to recall that shortly after his death, the order fell into nearly four decades of fractious dispute, which turned deadly in 1318, when four Spirituals were burned at the stake in Marseilles.48

it is evident that historians are privileged liars, who lend their pen to popular beliefs, exactly as most of the newspapers of the day express nothing but the opinions of their readers.

The works of the Impressionists, as much as those of any medieval craftsman or renaissance Humanist, are related to a world view, a context of interdependent beliefs and ideas about what is good and bad, true and false, the nature of existence and the means for investigating it. There are no 'value vacuums' in human history, no 'intermediary periods', only periods which are more or less unified, more or less amenable to the procedures, and temperaments, of historians.

Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.

Cotton Mather's publications in his own lifetime amounted to more than 400 titles, and his magnum opus, on which he labored most of his life, remains unpublished: a commentary on every verse of every book of the Bible. Anyone who leaves that kind of record behind issues an irresistible invitation to historians.

So many able historians have worked over seventeenth-century New England that one would think there was little left to be learned from the people who lived there - fewer than 100,000 at the end of the century. Seldom, apart perhaps from the Greeks and Romans, have so few been studied by so many.

Historians have become far too precious. Their work has become ever more specialised and, as they steadily lose the context of their studies, they end up knowing more and more about less and less. It's a malaise that has now infected A-levels and GCSEs.

Many scholars are not used to perceiving natural knowledge expressed in mythological language. If the study of fossils was not mentioned by Aristotle or Thucydides, and it wasn't, then it just didn't exist for many classicists and ancient historians.

There may be fewer women historians writing on traditionally 'male' subjects, but they are outstanding in the field - like Margaret MacMillan.

Years later, historians would try to explain the complicated reasons for such behavior. In part, they would conclude, it was a cocktail of harsh discipline, national fervor, religion, childhood education, a cultural embrace of obedience over individuality, and a demand for utter allegiance and bravery that was enforced with physical punishment. But to an Allied soldier in the field, it didn't matter why. They simply never wanted to find themselves at the mercy of the Japanese. That night

I have been reading history all my life, and am sharply aware that I know very little. I have an exaggerated respect for historians--certain historians; they seem to me grounded in a way that most of us are not, possessed of an extra sense by virtue of access to times and places when things were done differently. They have--can have--heightened perception.

still regarded as highly eccentric outside reactionary conservative and fascist circles,' notes Richard Thurlow, 'it is interesting to note that some historians now argue that secret societies like the IRA and the Mafia have indeed played a significant role in world events …

From the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, six generations of American scholars were mostly Whig historians of their nation. Their work tended to center on ideas of liberty and freedom, equal rights and republican self-government. Major themes were the triumph of those ideas and institutions over tyranny and slavery.

Memoirs and historical monographs by New Left historians painted a virginal portrait of radical protesters, rewriting the history of the period on a scale that would have seemed impossible outside the Communist bloc. In his own memoir, Hayden includes pages of excerpts from his FBI file, interspersed with disingenuous presentations of his political career that keep his readers in the dark about many of the far-from-innocent activities in which he actual1y engaged.

he ended his short note with a riddle: v. n. A. 1. de A. o. na. v. e. r. Historians have found it hard enough to transcribe the letters accurately, let alone to understand them. And full interpretation remains elusive.

THERE IS A general cry of paradox when scholars, struck by some historical error, attempt to correct it; but, for whoever studies modern history to its depths, it is plain that historians are privileged liars, who lend their pen to popular beliefs precisely as the newspapers of the day, or most of them, express the opinions of their readers.