A Quote by Lynn Townsend White, Jr.

The past in the hands of historians is not what it was.

Lynn Townsend White, Jr.

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Hands Historians Past

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Lynn Townsend White, Jr.
April 29, 1907 - March 30, 1987

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.

Michelle Dean

Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic - e.g., the ever-growing production of biographies of women is helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians.

Claire Tomalin

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.

Eric Hobsbawm

It is a grave error for historians of literature to interpret the national spirit of the age in an oversimplified manner, ignoring the complexity of various cultural and life processes. Instead of using their imagination, they try to read the future by observing the hands of a clock which is still busy measuring the past.

Mieczyslaw Jastrun

Our American past always speaks to us with two voices: the voice of the past, and the voice of the present. We are always asking two quite different questions. Historians reading the words of John Winthrop usually ask, What did they mean to him? Citizens ask, What do they mean to us? Historians are trained to seek the original meaning; all of us want to know the present meaning.

Daniel J. Boorstin

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

Historians are prophets of the past, not of the future.

Heather Cox Richardson

In the West the past is like a dead animal. It is a carcass picked at by the flies that call themselves historians and biographers. But in my culture the past lives. My people feel this way in part because death does not separate us from our ancestors.

Miriam Makeba

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

Samuel Butler

I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.

Ron Chernow

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

Margaret Atwood

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

Peter Greenaway

Since God himself cannot change the past, He is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians.

Samuel Butler

Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

F. Sionil Jose

If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.

E. M. Forster

Historians will consider this a dark age. Science historians can read Galileos technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minskys from the 1960s.

Stewart Brand

A Quote by Lynn Townsend White, Jr.

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