Monday, July 28, 2008

Quotations from Tosh #10: Utility

"For both nations and inviduals have sometimes made a virtue of neglecting history; and history has taken its revenge on them." -- H. R. Trevor-Roper "The Past and the Present: History and Sociology" (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 197.

"In the next century the nations revolted; and their revolt was nourished, everywhere, by history. It was the 'historic nations', the nations which were conscious of their history -- the Poles, Italians German -- which led the revolt; and all the nations in revolt began by discovering, or inventing, their history. No doubt the history which they discovered was not very good: the cosmopolitan historians of the eighteenth century were probably better as historians; but there was a large area of history which those historians had dangerously ignored and which now took its revenge." -- H. R. Trevor-Roper "The Past and the Present: History and Sociology" (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 197-198.

"It is right, I believe, to look for lessons in the past, to see its relevance to our own time, to observe the signs of continuity, connection and process. The past is not to be studied for its own sake. That is mere antiquarianism. But it is anachronistic, distorting, to judge the past as if it were subject to the present, as if the men of the eighteenth or the sixteenth or the tenth century had no right to be independent of the twentieth. We exist in and for our own time: why should we judge our predecessors as if they were less self-sufficient: as they existed for us and should be judged by us?" -- H. R. Trevor-Roper "The Past and the Present: History and Sociology" (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 200-1.

"The historian is amphibious: he must live some part of his life below the surface in order that, on emerging, he can usefully survey it from above. The historian who has specialized all his life may end as an antiquarian. The historian who has never specialized will end as a mere blower of froth. The antiquarian at least is useful to others." -- H. R. Trevor-Roper "The Past and the Present: History and Sociology" (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 201.

"If the future is not to be discovered but created, we need to recognize the power of such historical myths in helping to project a picture of the future which will rouse the enthusiasm or anger of the masses and sustain the faith or fanaticism of the elite." -- Alan Bullock, "Has History Ceased to be Relevant?" (1994), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 207.

"If one wants to know what is to be the future of history, one may well begin by studying the history of past futures." -- Alan Bullock, "Has History Ceased to be Relevant?" (1994), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 208.

"Of course, values based upon past experience have to be tested against and modified in the light of the new experience of each generation. But to ignore or throw them overboard, so that each generation starts again from scratch in the belief that no other has ever faced similar questions, and that nothing is to be learned from them, appears not only a form of arrogance but a wilful act of self mutilation." -- Alan Bullock, "Has History Ceased to be Relevant?" (1994), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 209.

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