You don’t go to the movies to do historical research, unless it’s historical research about the movies.
Europeans are forever the offspring of Machiavelli, trapped in a historical rollercoaster that can bring us a monarchy-toppling French Revolution and then a few years later Napoleon Bonaparte as emperor.
In the 1970s, as historians became enchanted with microhistories, economists were expanding the reach of their discipline. Nations, states and cities began to plan for the future by consulting with economists whose prognostications were shaped by investment cycles rather than historical ones.
It sort of filtered into their subconscious through motion pictures, but it’s an historical secret. This – whatever this is – needs to be studied and, in a kind of definitive way, talked about.
The historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism.
Who authorised the spend of millions of pounds and thousands of man hours into a stale, historical situation from three decades ago – with virtually no complaints made?
In all the areas within which the spiritual life of humanity is at work, the historical epoch wherein fate has placed us is an epoch of stupendous happenings.
I learned to paint in a historical method. First through watercolours and then through oil. Then, when I went to college and to the school of architecture, I took up modern painting.
For a country is not merely a piece of earth; it is, above all, a compendium of social, cultural, and historical factors which begin to acquire sense and order through the process of writing.
My films have often looked at the whole dilemma of identity as a straitjacket for people, for societies, for cultures, for historical moments.
Real history is far more complex and interesting than the simplistic summaries presented in Wikipedia articles. Knowing this allows you to question received wisdom, to challenge ‘facts’ ‘everybody’ knows to be true, and to imagine worlds and characters worthy of our rich historical heritage and our complex selves.
I will not be voting for Donald Trump for president. This is not a decision I make lightly, for I am a lifelong Republican. But Donald Trump does not reflect historical Republican values nor the inclusive approach to governing that is critical to healing the divisions in our country.
I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
I think I honestly invented my own genre, the historical spy novel.
People may assume ‘The Act of Killing’ is a historical documentary about what happened in 1965. But our purpose was to expose a present-day regime of fear for what it is.
I like the stories with the historical themes.
Kissinger’s monopoly on this historical record has driven many scholars to distraction. Groups of lawyers, scholars, journalists and archivists have used pronunciamento, lawsuit, and other crowbars in a usually vain effort to open Kissinger’s Library of Congress cache.
However, while we should certainly celebrate the demise of overt official racism, we must also critically examine where we are at this historical moment, recognize the many challenges ahead and reaffirm our commitment to making Brown v. Board a reality.
Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.
There is a vulgar incredulity, which in historical matters, as well as in those of religion, finds it easier to doubt than to examine.
After closely examining my conscience, I venture to state that in my historical novels I intended the content to be just as modern and up-to-date as in the contemporary ones.
Thus, in accordance with the spirit of the Historical School, knowledge of the principles of the human world falls within that world itself, and the human sciences form an independent system.
Presently, the Commission for Commemorating 350 Years of American Jewish History has been brought about to encourage and sponsor a variety of historical activities that advance our understanding of the American Jewish experience as it marks this milestone anniversary.
While I was pleasantly surprised by the relatively high number of jobs created in April, the fact is that job creation during this recovery period has significantly lagged both historical experience in recovery, and the projections of the Bush Administration.
I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I’m trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.
What we have to do now is to make the public at large aware that what we’re looking at is not a historical event but – and I have to be brutal and I am going to say it – a racket.
If people get inspired by ‘Baahubali’ as a film, and they realize they can make a big film or a historical film which has good drama and good visuals, if they realize there are good stories to tell here, then it is good.
The historical kings of England are all strong soldiers and leaders, but can you be a sensitive leader? It’s the same in politics, we talk about how proud we are to have had two women prime ministers, but would we be less ready for a sensitive prime minister?
Archival and published history does not always record personal relationships of historical figures, so characters must be invented to allow the subject to reveal their interior realm through intimate interaction.
I had hoped that going to Hiroshima would reveal something small, gritty, and precise to countervail the epic quality of historical accounts.
Marco Polo has been kind of buried under this cloud of rather banal historical dust, when the true story is so much more exciting.
I went to grad school with the grand plan of getting my Ph.D. and writing weighty, Tudor-Stuart-set historical fiction – from which I emerged with a law degree and a series of light-hearted historical romances about flower-named spies during the Napoleonic wars.
I never recreate dialogue. I have often been asked by people, ‘You must have made this up because this is dialogue, right?’ Anything in my books that is in quotes comes from some kind of living historical document: a letter, a memoir, a court transcript, a newspaper interview.
I think it’s important to understand that in the big historical context of things, there has been land degradation from civilisation since the beginning of history. I mean, the Rajputana desert in India is a manmade desert caused by overgrazing.
In terms of preparation, if there’s some historical context that’s needed, I do like to read a lot. Working on Joe Kennedy for ‘Boardwalk,’ I read a couple of biographies on him. It’s nice to have a broader context of the man outside of where the show is coming from.
The supernatural birth of Christ, his miracles, his resurrection and ascension, remain eternal truths, whatever doubts may be cast on their reality as historical facts.
To those who don’t know the historical truth, I would like to say today, Poland was not an aggressor but a victim during the Second World War.
There is a constant ebb and flow in art historical reputations. The reputation of even the greatest figures like Picasso are in flux.
The historical Woodrow Wilson suffered from numerous complaints which we might today label as psychosomatic. Yet, Wilson did have a stroke as a relatively young man of 39 and seemed always to be ill. He was ‘high-strung’ – intensely neurotic – yet a charismatic personality nonetheless.
I’m very proud to be black, but black is not all I am. That’s my cultural historical background, my genetic makeup, but it’s not all of who I am nor is it the basis from which I answer every question.
There’s a historical view that adding process into a scrappy start-up kills innovation, but I’m a firm believer that you need process at some point to remain agile.
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.
‘War and Peace’ holds a strange place in literary history, participating in the crowning of realism as a substantial and serious literary mode in America, even as the novel also contributed to the argument that historical fiction could be by nature dangerous, illegitimate, and inaccurate.
Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I’m attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.
We will be returning to historical levels of inequality. We’ll view post-war America as a kind of strange interlude not to be repeated. It won’t be the dreams that we all had that virtually all incomes go up in lockstep at three percent a year. It hurts to give that up.
I don’t separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they’re all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some investigation into the past.
When I was seven years old, I fell in love with a series published by Bobbs-Merrill called ‘The Childhood of Famous Americans.’ In it, historical figures like Clara Barton, Nancy Hanks, Elias Howe, Patrick Henry, and dozens more came to life for me as children.
