Historiography Quotes

“I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis”
― Antony Beevor

“History is the long struggle of man, by exercise of his reason, to understand his environment and to act upon it. But the modern period has broadened the struggle in a revolutionary way. Man now seeks to understand, and act on, not only his environment, but himself; and this has added, so to speak, a new dimension to reason and a new dimension to history.”
― Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History?

“All history is present history in the sense that the concerns of the present are bound somehow to affect the way history is studied and written. All history is also personal, since it is impossible to avoid the influence of one's own opinions and prejudices on the selection and emphasis of one's historical material.”
― Paul Cartledge

“Reading. The erotics of reading for me -- its moment of trembling pleasure -- lie in those times when I realise that what I am reading is just what I was about to say. It is a moment of jealousy and disappointment, as if the occasion had been stolen from me, but it is a moment of excitement, too -- because I think I would like to try and say it better, because now the monologue in my mind has become dialogue. My immediate impulse is to write something, anything, notes to tell me the significance of what I have read, an appreciative letter to the author, the first sentences in a preface to a book that will never be written. Th archives of my readings are monumentally high. I can never let these erotic moments go. They are the paper trail of my mind.”
― Greg Dening, Readings/Writings

“The person who expects to understand history must submerge himself in it, must get rid of patriotism, as well as bitterness. And especially in studying a historic life that consists in insecurity must the historian rid himself of all insecurity. He must accept the totality of the data in all their fullness, the noble with the paltry, thinking of how the two interlock.”
― Americo Castro

“forgetting... is an essential factor in the creation of a nation and it is for this reason that the progress of historical studies often poses a threat to nationality,”
― Ernest Renan

“If nature abhors a vacuum, historiography loves a void because it can be filled with any number of plausible accounts;
Howe, Nicholas, Anglo-Saxon England and the postcolonial void”
― Deanne Williams, Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures

“Renaissance" is not a good historical term, since it implies death and rebirth and great cataclysmic changes. There are few abysses or chasms in history; there are merely times when cultural change takes place more quickly and vigorously than at others.”
― Jeffrey Burton Russell, Medieval Civilization

“I don't adhere to the idea that you don't make moral judgments. I think history is a moral profession. We don't just look back and say, oh, and here is how they slaughtered the innocents, and go move on.”
― Annette Gordon-Reed

“Two hundred years from now nobody will care much about our politics. But
if we were truly moved by the things that happened to us, they may read our
poems.”
― W.H. Auden

“If scientists could point to the fabulous interconnections of the natural world, historians should try to understand the past in a similarly intricate fashion.”
― John H. Arnold, History: A Very Short Introduction

“History has a beginning in sources, but also in the gaps within and between sources.”
― John H. Arnold, History: A Very Short Introduction

“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.”
― Jeremy D. Popkin, From Herodotus to H-Net: The Story of Historiography

“Although history is concerned with the past, it is conducted in the present.”
― Jeremy D. Popkin, From Herodotus to H-Net: The Story of Historiography

“Things just happen, one after another. They don't care who knows. But history... ah, history is different. History has to be observed. Otherwise it's not history. It's just... well, things happening one after another.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“Women did not stand by and watch these changes occur. They participated, tangentially and head on, in debates about history writing that effected change.”
― Devoney Looser, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820

“Vietnam’daki resmi tarihyazımının dikkat çeken bir yönünü de analım. O da şudur: Sözgelimi Türkiye’de, Marksist tarihçiler arasında, birkaç istisnayı saymazsak, tarihteki hükümdarlara ilerici bir nitelik atfedilmezken, Vietnam’ın Marksist tarihyazımı, kimi kralları halk dostu, sömürgecilik karşıtı ve ilerici ve kimilerini ise halk düşmanı, sömürücü ve gerici olarak tarifleyerek, birinci kümedeki kralların övülmesinin önünü açıyor. Böylelikle, kimi Vietnam sokaklarına, Marksist tarihçiler eliyle kral isimleri veriliyor. Bu farkın altındaki bir etmen de, kuşkusuz, Türkiye’de padişahlığa dönüşün hâlâ olası olması, Vietnam’da ise krallığın çoktan tarihin çöp tenekesini boylamasıdır. Vietnam için, krallar geçmişe aitken, Türkiye’deki durum farklı...”
― Ulaş Başar Gezgin, Çin Araştırmalarından Vietnam’a Dirlik Düzenlik ve Çatışma

“It is well known…that the military historian is at his best when giving the names of field officers who fell in battle, and at his worst when attempting to explain the reason for the general officer to have made a certain decision at a certain time.”
― Steven Brust, The Paths of the Dead

“The proof that these words marked the event… is the very fact that no other words have ever been recorded; and it is well known that ‘historians’ of the popular school dearly love to mark great events by the words which accompanied them. What reason would they have for ignoring words to mark the occasion except that these words fail, in their judgment, to convey the proper sense of the occasion?”
― Steven Brust, The Lord of Castle Black

“Думите за равенство всякога подкупват многолюдието.”
― Симеон Радев, Строителите на съвременна България, том 1: Царуването на Кн. Александра 1879-1886.

“Аз зная, казваше той [П. Каравелов], че гдето има цензура, там атеизмът се разпростира и там стават революции, а там, дето няма цензура, хората са по-религиозни.”
― Симеон Радев, Строителите на съвременна България, том 1: Царуването на Кн. Александра 1879-1886.

“If to see with the sight of another is hypnotism, then every man who writes a book or tells a good tale is a hypnotist; every historian who makes us see the past is a necromancer.”
― Eleanor M. Ingram, The Thing From the Lake

“Jewish self-image and its historiographic reflection were transformed by the destruction of the state and temple and the exile of the Jewish people. But continuity was preserved in language and scripture, memory and commemoration. The rabbis were not only the supplanters but also the heirs and custodians of the old tradition from which they claimed to derive their own legitimacy. The situation in Persia and in other Middle Eastern countries was radically different. Here the conquest and conversion of these peoples to Islam brought radical change and, above all, discontinuity. Muslim conquest brought a new religion and the consequent changes were far greater than, for example, in Christendom. Christianity triumphed in the Roman Empire, but it did so by conversion, not by conquest, and it preserved the Roman state and the Roman law and learned to live with the Latin and Greek heritage. Islam created its own state, the Caliphate, and brought its own language, Arabic, and its own scripture, the Qur’an. The old states were destroyed. The old languages and even the old scripts were forgotten. The rupture was not as complete as was once thought, or as Muslims claimed, and much pre-Islamic custom survived under an Islamic veneer. [...] There was no usable past from a Muslim point of view—hence the Muslim neglect both of history and of epic, with only minor exceptions. There was thus complete discontinuity in the self-image, the corporate sense of identity, and the collective memory of the Islamic peoples of the Middle East.”
― Bernard Lewis, Historians of the Middle East

“At the beginning of the 19th century, all that the world knew of the history of the ancient Middle East was what preserved in Greek and Hebrew, that is to say by the only two peoples active in the ancient Middle East who had preserved continuity of identity into modern times, and who had retained and could still read their ancient writings. This history was part of their collective memory and was passed by them, with their scriptures and classics, to Christendom—but not to Islam, for Muslims read neither the Bible nor the classics. The name of Cyrus was well known in medieval Europe and appears even in the sagas of faraway Iceland. It does not appear in Islam, not even in Persia, where the pre-Islamic past was rejected and literally buried. The recovery was for long the work of European, later also of Russian and American, scholars, and was only gradually accepted by the Muslims of the Middle East.”
― Bernard Lewis, History: Remembered, Recovered, Invented

“But the true historical fervour is the love of the past for the sake of the past… And behind it is the very passion to understand men in their diversity, the desire to study a bygone age in the things in which it differs from the present. The true historical fervour is that of the man for whom the exercise of historical imagination brings its own reward, in those inklings of a deeper understanding, those glimpses of a new interpretative truth, which are the historian’s achievement and his aesthetic delight”
― Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History

“If history could be told in all its complexity and detail it would provide us with something as chaotic and baffling as life itself...”
― Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History

“Now more than ever, we realize that understanding the ancient past is essential to our understanding of the present and just plain fascinating.”
― Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“No, there are no peoples without history—it’s just that most people are not aware of other peoples’ histories.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

“Playing the role which has always fallen to the historian, the role of the traitor.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

“We gunnen onszelf zo graag het beeld van de geschiedenis als een onontkoombare stroom, als een onvermijdelijke gang van A naar D via B en C. Vergeet het maar. Ook in deze geschiedenis – die tevens de onze is – wemelt het van de wissels die op het allerlaatst nog werden omgegooid, van de momenten waarop alles heel anders had kunnen verlopen, van de situaties die smeken om een ‘what if’, een ‘wat als’-analyse.”
― Geert Mak, Wisselwachter