Quotes About Historiography

os nossos historiógrafos, há seis mil luas, não fazem referência a outras regiões senão aos dois grandes impérios de Lilipute e de Blefuscu. Estas duas poderosas potências têm, como ia dizendo, andado empenhadas, durante trinta e seis luas, numa guerra

History is no criminal court

Revisionism is a healthy historiographical process, and no one, not even revisionists, should be exempt from it.

Courses in historiography confront students with the possibility that history, like literature, is about stories and that it necessarily involves philosophical questions, such as how we can actually come to know things.

During the more than half a millennium when Catholics were using the university to develop theology, metaphysics, physics and eventually the sciences that led to the industrial revolution, scholarship for Jews meant studying the Talmud, which meant among other things, learning how to cheat the goyim in business transactions and then justify those practices with a veneer of pious rationalization. This is not my opinion; it is the verdict of Heinrich Graetz, the father of Jewish historiography,

Epic literature is not history but is again a way of looking at the past.

Historiography therefore becomes a prelude to understanding history as a form of knowledge.

The history of India was constructed in accordance with nineteenth century European views on what history should be and what was thought to be Indian history.

Western historians now needed to back off from comparisons with extra-European cultures and concentrate on their own societies, for which their terminology was native and so well suited.

A modern empiricist historian's response to ancient (especially Israelite) transcendent historiography might be: "It has not provided information that is reliable since it is so full of deity." The ancient historian's response to modern empiricist historiography might be: "It has not provided information that is worthwhile since it is so empty of deity.

Bernard Bailyn

The British attempt to disarm the militiamen and other inhabitants at Lexington and Concord could be regarded as a milestone in Second Amendment historiography. It undoubtedly helped inspire recognition of the right to keep and bear arms. Indeed, virtually every citizen was a militiaman who owned and kept his firearms at home, and the British sought to seize these private arms, as well as the stores of gunpowder and cannon held by the towns or controlled by committees of safety.

By taking this stand, Burckhardt emerged in most refreshing contrast with his contemporaries and many of his successors. For what he developed was nothing short of a psychology of historiography. The historian is to observe, contemplate, and enjoy the incredibly glorious richness of the human experience. He is to look for human greatness and creativity everywhere, even in periods that might seem alien and distant from him.

Examining the record of past research from the vantage of contemporary historiography, the historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. Even more important, during revolutions scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before.

With many important exceptions, the tone of much American historical writing turned deeply negative during the early twenty-first century. It remained so as these words were written, in 2021.

we never shall discover all the causal chains that operate: the number of such causes is infinitely great, the causes themselves infinitely small; historians select an absurdly small portion of them and attribute everything to this arbitrarily chosen tiny section.

Nobody is ignorant of the fact that historical events are made up of four factors: necessity, coincidence, spontaneity, freedom. Nevertheless, it is rare to find a historiographical school that does not seek to reduce them to a single factor.

Historiography -- commonly and often simultaneously defined as the study of historians' scholarship, how history has been and is contrived, the history of historical writing, and the body of historical scholarship on historical subject matter -- is, therefore, essential to understand when studying history.