As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford – British historians are supposed to write about kings – so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. The students work harder there.
Looking back as an historian, I find myself having great respect for Ronald Reagan’s consistency: his absolute conviction that the Soviet Union – the only competing world empire at the time – was bound to collapse!
In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not.
I’m not a politician or a scholar or political historian. I’m just a photographer who’s trying to capture a spirit. It’s not an intellectual process; it’s an intuitive process.
The Who quite possibly remain the greatest live band ever. Even the list-driven punk legend and music historian Johnny Ramone agreed with me on this.
If I hadn’t told stories, I would’ve been a historian.
Personally, speaking as a historian and a storyteller, when it comes to inaccuracy in historical fictioneering, I follow the Shakespeare principle: I’m willing to overlook gobs of mistaken detail if the poetic valence is basically correct.
The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
The only protection as a historian is to institute a process of research and writing that minimizes the possibility of error. And that I have tried to do, aided by modern technology, which enables me, having long since moved beyond longhand, to use a computer for both organizing and taking notes.
Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian – ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.
I’m not an historian and I’m not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who’s walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.
The historian Linda Colley has analysed how and why George III transformed himself from being a figure of ‘perfect hatred’ to the father of the country.
I think it’s outrageous if a historian has a ‘leading thought’ because it means they will select their material according to their thesis.
In my work as a historian and in my relationships as a friend, teacher, wife, and mother, I have come to think that the most useful way to understand the past and make it work for you is to look at the trade-offs and contradictions that, however deeply buried, can be uncovered in every memory, good or bad.
In African-American culture, there’s often a family historian, someone who does the genealogy or keeps the family Bible. I became aware that might be one role the poet has.
I’m not a historian who thinks Confederate memorials should be boarded up.
I went to medical school after having decided to do so somewhere between my junior and senior year at Harvard – very late. I initially wanted to be an intellectual historian.
The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.
Yet enthusiasm is no excuse for the historian going off balance. He should remind the reader that outcomes were neither inevitable nor foreordained, but subject to a thousand changes and chances.
I’m not a historian. I’m a politician. What is important for us is that the countries of the region and the people grow closer to each other, and that they are able to prevent aggression and injustice.
The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.
The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he’s nothing if he doesn’t make out a case.
I’m a basketball junkie and a real historian of the game, so for me to get a chance to express it and give my perspective on a national stage, I’m really enjoying it.
I’m not an historian but I can get interested – obsessively interested – with any aspect of the past, whether it’s palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.
Maybe this is because I’m a comics historian as much as anything else, but I really have a deep-seated respect for the characters that have been around since before I was born and are probably going to outlive me.
I do work half time as a historian of medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, and I started my career with work in the 19th century.
I lay no claim, it should be clear, to being a historian. So in my books, the intimate and personal have been intertwined inextricably with the broad and historical.
The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.
Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people’s thoughts.
My main ambition as a historian is to figure out what’s really happening in the world, instead of the fictions that humans have been creating for thousands of years in order to explain or control what’s happening in the world.
Even the most meticulous historians work subjectively. The historian’s point of view, his or her selection of subject and sources, the emphasis, the tone – all of these lead to subjective history, inevitably so. I do not say this as a criticism, merely as an observation.
You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.
I’m a historian. I really like the past. But most people seem far more interested in what you can tell them about the future.
My great inspiration has always been Studs Terkel, who is a wonderful American oral historian. He was a radio DJ at first, interviewed a lot of jazz musicians, and at some point started to interview Americans about work.
Despite a certain amount of rhetoric, such as ‘the second American Revolution,’ there is a fair consensus about which events in the affairs of a people can rightly be called revolutions. It is also clear that such revolutions are proper objects of study for the historian.
As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.
To win at Augusta and to win The Open Championship at St. Andrews, it’s hard to put it into words as a golfer, as an athlete, as a guy – I’m not rich in history, I can tell you that. I’m not a great historian.
I’m not an aviation historian, I’m not an Air Force aficionado, and I’m definitely not a ufologist. I’m not someone who studies UFOs.
I once interviewed David Herbert Donald, the Lincoln historian, and we talked about how one deals with the secondary sources and the previous biographies. He said something which kept coming back to me as I worked on Cleopatra, which was: ‘There’s no further new material; there are only new questions.’
I am no historian but have tried to stick tight to the facts.
Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.
Too rigid specialization is almost as bad for a historian’s mind, and for his ultimate reputation, as too early an indulgence in broad generalization and synthesis.
Being a historian, if only for the day, teaches you useful things like judgment, and the ability to detect when someone is lying to you.
The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
But in answer to your question about the conspiracy angle, I think that any historian worth his salt, and this is where I fault Stephen Ambrose and a lot of these guys who attack me – not all of life is a result of conspiracy by any means! Accident occurs alongside conspiracy.
By day I am a historian, by night a broadcaster.
I am a historian. I do a lot of research, and I try to get it right.
I am not a qualified historian, but rather a teller of stories from history.
If you think about it, the historian’s task is like that of the detective.
Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.
I’m a big historian. Big JFK fan. I got to take a picture under the official JFK White House portrait.
The greatest of all the Sioux in my time, or in any time for that matter, was that wonderful old fighting man, Sitting Bull, whose life will some day be written by a historian who can really give him his due.
Viereck became a historian, specializing in modern Russia, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.
People fight today for the same fundamental reasons the Greek historian Thucydides identified nearly 2,500 years ago: fear, honor, and interest.
As a historian, I always think you know what a moment was 20 years later.
‘Know,’ says a wise writer, the historian of kings, ‘Know the men that are to be trusted’; but how is this to be? The possession of knowledge involves both time and opportunities. Neither of these are ‘handservants at command.’
I really love acting, but I also really want to be a historian, so it’s really confusing.
I’m no politician. I’m an historian who has learned through a lifetime of studying that nothing in the world beats universal education.
