47 Quotes About Historiography

I am reminded of Housman's remark that 'accuracy is a duty, not a virtue.' To praise a historian for his accuracy is like praising an architect for using well-seasoned timber or properly mixed concrete in his building. It is a necessary condition of his work, but not his essential function.

The fatal weakness of most psychiatric historiographies lies in the historians' failure to give sufficient weight to the role of coercion in psychiatry and to acknowledge that mad-doctoring had nothing to do with healing.

Resources, waterways, and climatic zones loom so large in their writings that one can almost forget that people have something to do with the building of cities.

History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, it wages no battles. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; history is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.

If nature abhors a vacuum, historiography loves a void because it can be filled with any number of plausible accounts;Howe, Nicholas, Anglo-Saxon England and the postcolonial void

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.

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.

I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis

Rooting arguments in evidence and respecting scholarly norms, historians must craft stories that shape the future as well as the past.