The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.
What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity.
The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.
I am a historian. I do a lot of research, and I try to get it right.
Histories are to educate so that we understand better for ourselves and for motivation.
The way you 'take history' is also a way of 'making history.'
The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn't enter into it.
I'm a historian in my own mind.
Historians will handle a much wider range of sources than a biographer and will be covering a broader spectrum of events, time, peoples.
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