Yet enthusiasm is no excuse for the historian going off balance. He should remind the reader that outcomes were neither inevitable nor foreordained, but subject to a thousand changes and chances.
From Samuel E. Morison
Any child knows that history can only be a reduced representation of reality, but it must be a true one, not distorted by queer lenses.
Courses on historical methodology are not worth the time that they take up. I shall never give one myself, and I have observed that many of my colleagues who do give such courses refrain from exemplifying their methods by writing anything.
Every historian with professional standards speaks or writes what he believes to be true.
Everyone agrees to that; but when we come to define truth, dissension starts.
I have nothing revolutionary or even novel to offer.
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