A Quote by Robert Darnton
The notion of 'history from below' hit the history profession in England very hard around the time I came to Oxford in the early 1960s.
Related Quotes
I've never done a [Berthold] Brecht. In the 1960s when the Berliner Ensemble came over [to England] with Helene Weigel [Brecht's second wife], I saw all the Berlin actors. It was an amazing time, very exciting early 1960s.
I've always tried to write California history as American history. The paradox is that New England history is by definition national history, Mid-Atlantic history is national history. We're still suffering from that.
I'm very interested in the early American history, the time when the country came together.
My experience came before most of you were born. My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn't normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge. But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge. So, half a dozen of us tried - not all of us in history - and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
My father was a graduate student at Oxford in the early 1960s, where the conventions and etiquette of clothing were crucial to the pervasive class consciousness of the place and time.
Malibu history is interesting to me. My mom's family was one of the early families in California, so there's history going back to the 1840s or '50s. They came over in the Gold Rush, actually. I have all this guilt about raising my daughter in the East. Coco's very anti-California. It's her way of rebelling.
Throughout the human experience people have read history because they felt that it was a pleasure and that it was in some way instructive. The profession of professor of history has taken it in a very different direction.
I started drumming around the same time I came across this part of American history. But there seemed to be a way forward playing drums. There didn't seem to be a way forward being fascinated by a piece of history.
The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.
I was born in England and went to school there. That's when I discovered my undying passion for history - not just for the Middle Ages, but all periods of history. My favorites are medieval, Elizabethan, and Georgian; however, I've written stories set in periods as early as ancient Rome, right up to the Victorian era.
All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.
As biological organisms made of matter, we are subject to the laws of physics and biology: as conscious persons who create our own history we are free to decide what that history shall be. Without science, we should have no notion of equality; without art, no notion of liberty.
There is only one history of any importance, and it is the history of what you once believed in, and the history of what you came to believe in.
I believe that hundreds of years from now, history will be divided into pre-1960s and post-1960s.
Turned the wrong way around, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied in "History", harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.
When I came to write my Thomas Cromwell books, I moved onto the center ground of English history, but I was never there before. I didn't feel it was my history particularly, coming from Northern Britain, being of Irish extraction, being a cradle Catholic. The image of England I grew up with felt somewhere else. There was an official England in postcards, but it wasn't one I had visited. But I decided to march onto the center ground and occupy it whether it was mine or not.
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