“ I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis Antony Beevor
“ Historical periodization always tells a story. It is a narrative device for putting meaning into the flux of historical process - creating protagonists, heroes, pace, and plot. For this reason, the di… James Ferguson
“ 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. William Cronon
“ The distinction between "paid labor" and "housework" implied in working-class men's yearning for the domestic ideal persisted in later-nineteenth-century analyses of women's unpaid labor and was event… Jeanne Boydston
“ The bible is history. Remember that it is not a book. It is a library. It contains many kinds of books, letters, songs, and histories, along with the poetry of mythology. We sometimes separate history… David C. Alves
“ Thenceforth they thought that, rationally concluded, doubt could become an instrument of knowledge. Marc Bloch
“ History is about the past. Yet it exists only in the present – the moment of its creation as history provides us with a narrative constructed after the events with which it is concerned. The narrative… Dana Arnold
“ Marx wrote that 'History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.' This was witty but far from true. History is never repeated, but it borrows, steals, echoes and commandeers the past to cre… Simon Sebag Montefiore
“ I might, indeed, read history; but whenever I attempt to do so, I am to tell you the truth, driven from it by disgust—What is it, but a miserably mortifying detail of crimes and follies?—of the guilt… Charlotte Turner Smith
“ 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 nothin… Thomas Szasz
“ Historiography -- commonly and often simultaneously defined as the study of historians' scholarship, how history has been and is contrived, the history of historical writing, and the body of historica… Pero Gaglo Dagbovie
“ As historians, our aim is to do our utmost to understand and elucidate past reality. At the same time, in pursuit of this goal, we must use ordering concepts that by definition inevitably introduce an… Paul A. Cohen
“ It is a truism, easily forgotten, that the West, in its modern phase, has not stood still. Also easily forgotten is the fact that "the West" is a relative concept only. Without an "East" or a "non-Wes… Paul A. Cohen
“ China failed to maintain its technological lead, and a similar failure throughout Asia to take advantage of the early exposure to that head start transformed precocity into a false dawn. Perversely, A… Peter A. Lorge
“ ... the very appearance of the word ‘‘oriental’’ as a serious geographic or cultural term triggers alarm bells for any American academic. The late Edward Said’s Orientalism argued that the word ‘‘orie… Peter A. Lorge
“ Technology has become the West’s main prop to its claims of inherent superiority over the non-West, and the reason why the non-West should adopt Western culture. If advanced technology is particular t… Peter A. Lorge
“ Perhaps the strangest manifestation of the Eurocentric approach to the history of military technology is ... the attempt to discern fundamental cultural roots in the distant past that have resulted in… Peter A. Lorge
“ ...the modern bias in contemporary Western scholarship (which has spread to the rest of the world as well) insists upon focusing all attention on the formation of the modern world and ‘‘modernity.’’ B… Peter A. Lorge
“ I suggest that the Western impact, at least in nineteenth-century China, was overstated (and misstated) by an earlier generation of American historians. An especially egregious example of this, I argu… Paul A. Cohen
“ Indebtedness among historians is a peculiar thing, however. We don’t simply, in mechanical fashion, inherit a body of knowledge, add something to it, and pass it on. We also question, test, and shake… Paul A. Cohen
