Edmund Morgan Quotes

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.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

My opinion is that politicians should be humble in the face of history. And whenever history is a matter of debate, it should be left in the hands of historians and experts.

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

Even historians with knowledge of the event, and with the materials before them on which to form a judgment, see but little way into the causes and consequences of the great events in human history.

One test of a great work of history is does it make you feel like you have lived through the period

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.

The dignity of history consists in reciting events with truth and accuracy, and in presenting human agents and their actions in an interesting and instructive form. The first element in history, therefore, is truthfulness; and this truthfulness must be displayed in a concrete form.

Whoever writes on world history, but not as a forensic history, becomes thereby an accomplice.

The ‘facts' of history do not exist for any historian until he creates them, and into every fact that he creates some part of his individual experience must enter. But experience not only furnishes the elements for the image which the sources guide us in forming: it is also the final court of appeal in evaluating the sources themselves.

We often do not get the first draft of history right.

No two historians offer precisely the same reading of an historical event; if we did, far fewer articles and books would be published.

Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.

You're not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.

History is more or less bunk.

History tends to take the simplest possible view. As soon as you start to scratch the surface of any historical event, it starts to become more and more complicated, which is not the stuff of Hollywood films. Complications tend to break down the budget.

As a historian, I love every little detail, but whole long passages about wood paneling and journeys on horseback and every stop at every inn had to go out the window. I decided the history in the books should be like spice in a soup - a little went a long way. Like cilantro.

What 'Floating Worlds' does draw on is Holland's artistry in bringing the past to life in her historical fiction and depicting the people who inhabited that past.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

History is a way of interpreting, rather than, say, knowing, the past. It is usually a set of disputes between those who have access to the same sources. It depends on ideology as much as voting in an election does.

I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

Accuracy is paramount in every detail of a work of history. Here's my rule: Ask yourself, 'Did this thing happen?' If the answer is yes, then it's historical. Then ask, 'Did this thing happen precisely this way?' If the answer is yes, then it's history; if the answer is no, not precisely this way, then it's historical drama.