Historiography Vs History Quotes & Sayings

I might, indeed, read history; but whenever I attempt to do so, I am to tell you the truth, driven from it by disgust - What is it, but a miserably mortifying detail of crimes and follies? - of the guilt of a few, and the sufferings of many, while almost every page offers an argument in favor of what I never will believe - that heaven created the human race only to destroy itself. — Charlotte Turner Smith

Thenceforth they thought that, rationally concluded, doubt could become an instrument of knowledge. — Marc Bloch

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

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 Anthony Cartledge

I suggest that the Western impact, at least in nineteenth-century China, was overstated (and misstated) by an earlier generation of American historians. An especially egregious example of this, I argue, was American treatment of the Opium War, the objective importance of which was not nearly so great as we - and an almost unanimous corps of Chinese historians - have imagined. — Paul A. Cohen

...the modern bias in contemporary Western scholarship (which has spread to the rest of the world as well) insists upon focusing all attention on the formation of the modern world and 'modernity.' By directing attention to a time period rather than to a region, Western scholars can place the West at the center of any discussion, and subordinate backward Asia to Western history, without explicitly condemning Asian cultures and polities or arguing for a narrowly Eurocentric view of the world. Nevertheless, modern history is effectively a racist pursuit that not only elevates white Westerners above all others, but also actively denigrates Asian history. — Peter A. Lorge

History - the product, not the raw material - is a bottle with a label. For many years now, the emphasis of historical discussion has been laid upon the label (its iconography, its target-group of customers) and upon the interesting problems of manufacturing bottle-glass. The contents, on the other hand, are tasted in a knowing, perfunctory way and then spat out again. Only amateurs swallow them. — Neal Ascherson

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening
on a lucky day
without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply). — Barbara W. Tuchman

Where the Depression years had aroused a deep sense of concern over how American wealth was distributed and American society structured, the successive crises of the 1960s and early 1970s, by highlighting the contradiction between the destructive capability of American technology and the moral opaqueness of those Americans who had ultimate control over its use, raised questions about the very course of "modern" historical development. After Vietnam, there could be no more easy assumptions about the goodness of American power, no more easy equating of being "modern" with being "civilized. — Paul A. Cohen

Perhaps the strangest manifestation of the Eurocentric approach to the history of military technology is ... the attempt to discern fundamental cultural roots in the distant past that have resulted in the perceived current Western dominance of the world. This essentialism attempts to contrast ancient Greek logic and philosophy with the less rationally minded philosophies of the non-West. Modern science and technology, in this view, is a simple jump from ancient Greece to early modern Europe. — Peter A. Lorge

Our
outsideness, after all, is a major part of what makes us different from the direct
participants in history and enables us, as historians, to render the past intelligible
and meaningful in ways that simply are not available to those immediately in-
volved. In other words, outsideness, whether that of Americans addressing the Chi-
nese past or of historians in general addressing the past in general, does not just
distort; it also illuminates. This means that, as I said earlier, our central task is to
find ways of exploiting our outsideness that maximize the illumination and mini-
mize the distortion. — Paul A. Cohen

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

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. — Pero Gaglo Dagbovie

As historians, our aim is to do our utmost to understand and elucidate past reality. At the same time, in pursuit of this goal, we must use ordering concepts that by definition inevitably introduce an element of distortion. I believe that our task as historians is to choose concepts that combine a maximum of explanatory power with a minimum of distortional effect. — Paul A. Cohen

Apocalypse is the lens through which we view international politics because it is the fons et origo of the concept of history and historiography. Were it not for apocalypse, we would not have the categories of mind with which to ask the questions of meaning and adequacy of interpretation. M — Robert Hamerton-Kelly

My point is, or should be, simple: history happened. The object is not to undo it, distort it, or to make it fit our present political attitudes. The object of history, which each generation properly interprets anew, is to understand what happened and why. A multicultural Canada can and should look at its past with fresh eyes. It should, for example, study how the Ukrainians came to Canada, how they were treated, how they lived, sometimes suffered, ultimately prospered, and became Canadians. What historians should not do is to recreate history to make it serve present purposes. They should not obscure or reshape events to make them fit political agendas. They should not declare whole areas of the past off-limits because they can only be presented in politically unfashionable terms any more than they should fail to draw object lessons from a past that was frequently less than pleasant and less than honourable. Because the past was not perfect, it must not be made perfect today. — J.L. Granatstein

Historical periodization always tells a story. It is a narrative device for putting meaning into the flux of historical process - creating protagonists, heroes, pace, and plot. For this reason, the division of history into periods always carries an ideological load, and it is a methodological imperative to approach questions of broad historical periodization with this in mind. — James Ferguson

Technology is often portrayed as an objective measure of development, and its advancement as something that can be examined outside of politics. But the history of technology, particularly military technology, has been deeply inflected by nationalist sentiment. — Peter A. Lorge

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

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

European historians have often, though not unanimously, assumed that European modern warfare was the one true path, a system that developed logically and inevitably from the nature of the advancing technology of guns. Since Europeans by their own definition were the most rational and logical of people, their mode of warfare was also the most rational and logical. Those who did not adopt it after seeing it were being deliberately irrational, or lacked the ability to advance their polity to the point where it could follow it. — Peter A. Lorge

People who are not historians sometimes think of history as the facts about the past. Historians are supposed to know otherwise. The facts are there, to be sure, but they are infinite in number and speak, if at all, in conflicting, often unintelligible, voices. It is the task of the historian to reach back into this incoherent babel of facts, choose the ones that are important, and figure out what it is they say. — Paul A. Cohen

Marx wrote that 'History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.' This was witty but far from true. History is never repeated, but it borrows, steals, echoes and commandeers the past to create a hybrid, something unique out of the ingredients of past and present. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Indebtedness among historians is a peculiar thing, however. We don't simply, in mechanical fashion, inherit a body of knowledge, add something to it, and pass it on. We also question, test, and shake here and there the intellectual scaffolding surrounding our predecessors' work, in the full, ironic knowledge that someone else is going to come along and give the scaffolding surrounding our own work a good shake, too, that no historian, in short, is ever permitted the final word. — Paul A. Cohen

The mainstreaming of African American history was a byproduct of the long black freedom struggle, the early black history movement, and the black student movement of the Black Power era. — Pero Gaglo Dagbovie

For myself, I would rather not write history than write it for the purpose of following the prejudices and passions of the times.

Here, someone makes the Capetians descend from the Merovingians; there, someone else has it that the name very Christian has always been applied to the {French} princes.

They don't form a system after reading history; they begin with the system and then search for the proofs. — Montesquieu

The hardest task for the historian ... is to consider the evidence without prejudice. We all have prior agendas and tend to find what we're looking for while ignoring anything contrary to our expectations. So history, because it is a human pursuit, is always partial and prejudiced no less than our own interior lives: both are just a sum of contingent memories. — Christopher Evans

Guns neither initiated nor enabled larger changes. Economic, political, and social development preceded and laid the foundation for the invention and use of the gun, not the other way around. — Peter A. Lorge

Is it really true... that our aim as historians is in some sense to recapture past reality, "to retrieve the truth about the past?" If so, what do "past reality" and "the truth about the past" mean? How does the historian's understanding of "reality" and "truth" differ - as most surely it does - from that of the direct participant? And what implications does this difference have for what we do as historians? It is not likely that questions of this sort will ever be finally answered. Yet clearly we must keep asking such questions if we are to maintain the highest levels of honesty and self-awareness concerning our work as historians. — Paul A. Cohen

The bible is history. Remember that it is not a book. It is a library. It contains many kinds of books, letters, songs, and histories, along with the poetry of mythology. We sometimes separate history from mythology, but the bible doesn't. Nor did C. S. Lewis when he wrote, Christianity is myth that is true. — David C. Alves