Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does not expect, nor often get.
Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.
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.
There are many oral historians in America, but my books are made using the rules of novel writing. I have a beginning, a plot, characters.
The Law and Justice government does not want a bunch of foreign historians to decide what goes on in ‘their’ museum.
At BYU, I discovered history, then historiography. I became fascinated with the study of historians and historical trends, with the idea that the way we remember the past changes and shifts with our own preoccupations.
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.
Where I think historians can help preserve and actually restore democracy is to remind us of how we got it.
When historians look at the Obama presidency, they’re likely to credit him especially for doing the politically unpopular things that were needed in 2009 to salvage the financial wreckage.
As historians write more and more histories, it’s a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that other historians read their histories and then make synthesis, and certain things just get forgotten and left out and neglected.
Trump is a populist in the same mold as the nineteenth-century Populists who gave their name to American grassroots political movements. Historians and pundits argued themselves blue in the face over whether Populists were reactionary or progressive, but they were both.
The funny thing is that Dick Cheney has done more than anybody in the White House for quite a long time to throw up roadblocks against future historians.
Some historians trace the start of the War on Terror to November 4, 1979, the day the hostages were taken in Tehran.
The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.
There may be fewer women historians writing on traditionally ‘male’ subjects, but they are outstanding in the field – like Margaret MacMillan.
The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It’s very restful – because you read. There’s some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human interaction.
Historians will handle a much wider range of sources than a biographer and will be covering a broader spectrum of events, time, peoples.
Originally, in fact, the power to pardon was used precisely for economic and political ends. Legal historians have noted that in England, kings used pardons for their own ends. For instance, criminals could be pardoned if they agreed to labor for the American colonies or the Crown’s navy.
Futurism today is led by science-fiction writers, by sociologists, by historians. Now, I have nothing against them. I’m sure they do great work. But they’re not scientists. They’re clueless.
Historians evaluating George W. Bush’s first term will focus on foreign policy and, most of all, 9/11. I think they will criticize him for his early reaction, for not returning at once to Washington, D.C.
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.
I cannot write about the past unless I go where history happened. Some make very good armchair historians, I’m not one of them. If you’re going to inhabit someone else’s world, the very least you can do is to spend a little time in it.
The future art historians are going to be software guys who are going to go into the depths of the code to find out what was changed hundreds of years before.
History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.
Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.
In the more recently disclosed field of history in the ancient Near East, however, there has been no such sense of responsibility displayed by historians either in Europe or America.
Presidential legacies are valuable things, too valuable to be left up to historians.
The fall of Rome seemed unthinkable to people at the time but inevitable to historians reflecting upon it with the benefit of context.
Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.
I usually turn over when ads appear on television. But – very rarely – I am gripped by a particularly beautiful one, and wonder if art historians of the future will point to these televisual delights as our best art.
Perhaps it is because I’m a writer trained in history that I’ve always assumed I would make mistakes in my drafts. Historians know how faulty human memory can be.
If historians don’t tell stories at the scales of creation myths, someone else will.
The Elephantine papyri – written as some of the books of the Bible are being written – is true social and legal documentation, and to historians overwhelmingly powerful and moving, even when ostensibly about trivial things.
The best writers attempt to become alternative historians.
If we do not, as historians, write the history of great events as well as the small stories that make up the past, others will, and they will not necessarily do it well.
Fact-checking doesn’t exist primarily because some of us are liars and cheats. It exists because writers will be writers, much as they may mean to be historians.
Since German reunification in 1990, historians and researchers have been free to work in the East, where the lost Nazi art collection disappeared.
Historians are prophets of the past, not of the future.
It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.
Both European and American historians have done away with any conceptual limits on what in the past needs and deserves investigating. The result, among other things, has been a flood of works on gender history, black history, and ethnic history of all kinds.
Look, I do not control alpinism. But maybe I was too successful. Many in the mountaineering scene – journalists, second-rate climbers, lecturers, so-called historians – had a problem with me for many years.
The main reason why historians have skated over the relationship of Victorian PMs with the press is that they haven’t been looking for it. It takes a lecturer in media studies such as Paul Brighton to point out that media management was part of the job of a Victorian prime minister.
At some time in their careers, most good historians itch to write a history of the world, endeavor to discover what makes humanity the most destructive and creative of species.
I’m not a historian. I know historians. I’ve worked with them. They have a really powerful way of looking at the world, and I think so do poets.
There’s certainly more new SF available than when I started writing. That means there’s also more bad SF available. Whether there is also more good is a matter for future historians of the field.
The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.
The historical profession is nowhere famous for its tolerance, but there are not many countries where historians can expect to pay for their opinions with penal servitude or the firing squad.
Historians of European royalty have written of the king’s ‘two bodies’ : one mortal and corrupt; the other divine, abstract and timeless.
I think that a movie can only be an adjunct or only a supplement to books, to different points of view, to scholars, historians and your own teachers.
In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won’t necessarily make it into the history books.
