Historiography Quotes

• The writing of history reflects the interests, predilections, and even prejudices of a given generation.

  John Hope Franklin

  Writing, History, Prejudice

  26 Copy quote

• Without the imaginative insight which goes with creative literature, history cannot be intelligibly written.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  Literature History, Creative, Insight

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• Very few college professors want high school graduates in their history class who are simply "gung ho" and "rah-rah" with regard to everything the United States has ever done, have never thought critically in their life, don't know the meaning of the word "historiography" and have never heard of it. They think that history is something you're supposed to memorize and that's about it. That's not what high school, or what college history teachers want.

  James W. Loewen

  Teacher, School, College

  "Oh What a Web Textbooks Weave". Interview with Daniel Falcone, truthout.org. August 12, 2013.

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• The older I get the more I'm convinced that it's the purpose of politicians and journalists to say the world is very simple, whereas it's the purpose of historians to say, 'No! It's very complicated.'
  The job of the historian is to help give people a sense of existence in time, without which we are really not fully human.

  David Cannadine

  Jobs, Simple, History

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• If physicists could not quote in the text, they would not feel that much was lost with respect to advancement of knowledge of the natural world. If historians could not quote, they would deem it a disastrous impediment to the communication of knowledge about the past. A luxury for physicists, quotation is a necessity for historians, indispensable to historiography.

  J. H. Hexter

  Communication, Knowledge, Science

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• . . . What role does historiography play in the way a society and culture "remembers" past events? Does the historian have a moral or civic responsibility to this project of memory that ought to influence the way he or she engages in historical practice? Should moral concerns influence the historian's choice of subject matter, of issues to discuss, of evidence to use?

  Michael L Morgan

  Memories, Responsibility, Past

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• I persist in preferring philosophers to rabbis priests imams ayatollahs and mullahs. Rather than trust their theological hocus-pocus I prefer to draw on alternatives to the dominant philosophical historiography: the laughers materialists radicals cynics hedonists atheists sensualists voluptuaries. They know that there is only one world and that promotion of an afterlife deprives us of the enjoyment and benefit of the only one there is. A genuinely deadly sin.

  Michel Onfray

  Atheist, Philosophical, Afterlife

  Michel Onfray, Jeremy Leggatt (2007). “Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam”, p.219, Arcade Publishing

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