Unfortunately, historians have become so absorbed in detailed research that they have tended to neglect the job of building larger-scale maps of the past.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Ironically, the more intensive and far-reaching a historian's research, the greater the difficulty of citation. As the mountain of material grows, so does the possibility of error.
Leave history to historians.
History speaks to artists. It changes the artist's thinking and is constantly reshaping it into different and unexpected images.
Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.
Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
We take it for granted sometimes that certain parts of our history are told, and we take it for granted that we know all that stuff, and we move forward along on that basis, but there are also massive gaps, and we have to try to address them.
There's a need to dig up the past and analyze it.
The novelist's obligation to remake the sensuous texture of a vanished world is also the historian's. The strongest fiction writers often do deep research to make the thought and utterances of lost time credible.
Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.
History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.