Historical event

“ The rapid changes through which the institutions of the country are now passing, and the still more stupendous revolutions in the opinions of men, remind us that we stand to-day upon the outer verge of a great historic cycle, within which a completed past will shortly be enclosed. ”

“ SCOPE OF HISTORY.—The rise and progress of culture and civilization in their various constituents is the theme of history. It does not limit its attention to a particular fraction of a people, to the exclusion of the rest. Governments and rulers, and the public doings of states,—such as foreign wars, and the struggles of rival dynasties,—naturally form a prominent topic in historical writings. But this is only one department in the records of the past. More and more history interests itself in the character of society at large, and in the phases through which it has passed. ”

“ A diplomatic, a military, or a parliamentary history, dealing with a short period or a particular episode, must evidently be treated in a very different spirit from an extended history where the object of the historian should be to describe the various aspects of the national life, and to trace through long periods of time the ultimate causes of national progress and decay. ”

“ If a man, such as we are supposing, should write the history of England, he would assuredly not omit the battles, the sieges, the negotiations, the seditions, the ministerial changes. But with these he would intersperse the details which are the charm of historical romances. ”

“ Every person acquainted with the political writers of the last generation will recollect the terms in which they generally speak of that time. It was a glimpse of a golden age of union and glory, a short interval of rest, which had been preceded by centuries of agitation, and which centuries of agitation were destined to follow. ”

“ Across the stage of time the nations pass in the solemn pomp of their historical procession; what kingly forms sweep by, leading the nations of the past, the present age! Let them pass—their mingled good and ill. ”

“ The marvelous story of humanity is enacted again for our edification, instruction, and delight. We behold civilizations begin, struggle, triumph, and decay, giving place to higher and nobler as they pass away. Poet, lawgiver, and soldier sing their songs, make their codes, and fight their battles again, while we follow the never-dying effects of song, of law, and of battle. We sit down with 'princes, potentates, and powers,' watching them, as they think, governing the world.... Shut up in a little room we can witness the whole drama of man's history played on the vast stage of the world. ”

“ A history which shall record, not the deeds of our Commanders and Generals, noble and great as they were, because these will scarcely fail of historical record and prominence; but my history shall preserve for the descendants of those who fought for our flag, the noble deeds of our privates, who shared the danger but missed the glory. Scattered far and wide in our remote villages—hidden away amid our mountains—struggling for daily bread in our swarming cities, are these unrecognized heroes. ”

“ We have already seen that after the peace, the infant confederated states exhibited scenes and disclosed projects that open too wide a field for discussion to bring down a regular historical work, farther than the moment when winds up the drama of the military, political, and civil administration of a man, whose name will have a conspicuous place in all future historical records. ”

“ The field of battle, the struggle itself and the contending forces have been changed in the historical course of the social movement, which began in the last century and which we are still continuing. ”

“ But we are acquainted with no history which approaches to our notion of what a history ought to be—with no history which does not widely depart, either on the right hand or on the left, from the exact line. ”

“ In few periods has there been so great a difference between the ideals created by the popular imagination and the realities that are recognised by history. Few wars have been accompanied by more cruelty, more outrage, and more licentiousness than the Crusades or have brought a blacker cloud of disasters in their train. ”

“ Such a method of reading the history of a complicated period may, of course, be open to objection from the point of view of absolute historical truth. The effort to give unity to a period of history may easily fall into the inaccuracy of exaggeration. ”

“ But the feelings of nationality against imperial control by Church or State, the growth of the towns and commerce, the gradual development of representative government, the struggles against despotism—these are things he can understand and appreciate and in connection with which he can see the present emerging from the past. Nor should the great personalities of medieval and modern history be neglected, for they have historical interest and importance and serve to give greater interest and definiteness to movements of which they are a part. ”

“ Thousands of facts would come to light which would be of immense historical importance, as also of great political value to Government, facts that in a few years will become lost to the world, or be remembered only as traditions of 1857. ”

“ The rise and fall of dynasties, the evolutions of armies, the recital of battles, sieges, and skirmishes, the enumeration of captives and booty, the exultation of the victor, the distress of the vanquished, the crimes and excesses engendered by sedition, have, it is true, in all periods of the world, been considered the most important, often the only, subjects worthy of historical narration. These, however, are but the manifestations of conditions upon which are dependent all that is valuable and all that is instructive in the noble science which depicts the occurrences of past ages. ”

“ One of the strongest points in our argument is the fact that history, as we have it, is composed of the clang of battles and the private lives of kings and despots. The ordinary, everyday life of the peasant people—the working classes—the backbone of the nation, so to speak—was beneath the consideration of the historian throughout all times. ”

“ At the same time, according to the mentality of the nation, it will insist on historical military glory, on the pursuit of the national aspirations such as recovery of ancient rights, redress of old wrongs, material benefits to be derived from victory, appalling consequences of defeat. ”

“ Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that the nation might live. ”

“ We may have the military, the political, the social, the industrial, the economic, or the religious history of England, for instance, and although these histories will overlap and involve one another, each of them will exhibit a career which is peculiar and distinct from its fellows. ”

“ The American War was followed by the French Revolution, and the crash of a falling throne awakened opinion all over Europe. The young inquired whether men are not born equal; the old shook their heads, and asked what was to come next? ”

“ A true and comprehensive history should be the life of a nation. It should describe it in its larger and more various aspects. It should be a study of causes and effects, of distant as well as proximate causes, and of the large, slow and permanent evolution of things. It should include, as Buckle and Macaulay saw, the social, the industrial, the intellectual life of the nation as well as mere political changes, and it should be pre-eminently marked by a true perspective dealing with subjects at a length proportioned to their real importance. ”

“ History can seldom recover a given set of circumstances and make us see a definite situation, a particular knot of human action at a given place and a given time; if two diplomatists meet in a certain room to settle a problem, and afterwards describe their proceedings to their respective governments, or recall them in memoirs, if Napoleon meets Metternich in time of crisis at Prague, we can only recover a dim and faulty account of the interview from their conflicting descriptions; and yet this is one of the most precise and clear situations that a historian might wish to narrate. ”

“ These subordinate peculiarities will depend first on the peculiar genius, idea and work of the nation, and next on the transient circumstances, geographical, climactic, historical and secular, to which the nation has been exposed. The past helped form the circumstances of the present age, and they the character of the men now living. ”

“ A hundred things have helped to build up this picture-gallery of history—not merely history-books, but Bible-stories, and local traditions and stories from opera; not merely biographies but the border-ballads that the old gipsies would sing amid grim surroundings, and the rant of politicians who talk of Magna Carta or Nelson, and the picturesque advertisements of magazines and street-posters; out of all these there has grown up a world in our minds and that world is what we make for ourselves of the past. ”

“ The Revolutionary War gave our historians new motives for writing. A glorious struggle was to be described; the states, just raised out of the rank of colonies, began to demand the preservation of their earliest history; and the nation, inspired by great hopes for the future, felt that it must have loyal men to prepare the record of common growth and common achievement. The men who responded to these impulses were, perhaps, less cultured than the best of the old historians. ”

“ Similarly, if we unlock the past in our minds a score of pictures leap before us, breaking into one another. And the history that history-books can tell us bears a relation to that picture which we make for ourselves of the past, something like the relation which a map of England bears to that mental picture that we form of the English countryside. ”

“ Our national history, of course, has its own great and spreading pattern, which can be seen in its full form and completeness only when the stuff of our national life is laid before us in broad surfaces and upon an ample scale. ”

“ History, the mirror of the past, reflects, with painful fidelity, the dark as well as the bright objects from departed years; and although we may wish to contemplate only the glowing picture of patriotism and prosperity, the gloomy image of civil commotion is still full in our sight, shadowing the background with its solemn admonition. ”

“ We judge a period mainly by its great men, by its brilliant or salient incidents, by the fortunes of a small class; and the great mass of obscure, suffering, inarticulate humanity, whose happiness is often so profoundly affected by political and military events, almost escapes our notice. It should be the object of history to bring before us past events in their true proportion and significance, and one of the greatest improvements in modern history is the increased [11] attention which is paid to the social, industrial, and moral history of the poor. ”

“ The history of the Middle Ages and of modern times chronicles the nations and empires that have sunk in this mighty current, and the new life and new civilization that have sprung up over the ruins of the old. ”

“ Add to the influence of these surroundings the fact that great events—wars on the Continent, the rebellion of the American Colonies, the Government of India, the revolution in France—occupied the attention and inspired the eloquence of the leading statesmen—creating an atmosphere favourable to great emotions and to rhetorical display. ”

“ The history of religion, of art, of literature, of social and industrial development, of scientific progress, have all their different methods. A writer who treats of some great revolution that has transformed human affairs should deal largely in retrospect, for the most important part of his task is to explain the long course of events that prepared and produced the catastrophe; while a writer who treats of more normal times will do well to plunge rapidly into his theme. ”

“ The degree of certainty that it is possible to attain in history varies greatly in different departments. The growth of institutions and laws, military events, changes in manners and in creeds, can be described with much confidence, and although it is more difficult to depict the inner moral life of nations, the influences that form their characters and prepare them for greatness or decay, yet [7] when the materials for our induction are sufficiently large this field of history may be studied with great profit. ”

“ The progress of time, the increase of wealth, the diffusion of knowledge, the great change in the European system of war, rendered it impossible that any of the monarchies of the middle ages should continue to exist on the old footing. ”

“ It is the general truths that stir a life-like curiosity as to the particulars which they are the means of lighting up. Now this short course would be quite enough to present in a bold outline—and it need not be a whit the less true and real for being both bold and rapid—the great chains of events and the decisive movements that have made of ourselves and our institutions what we and what they are—the Teutonic beginnings, the Conquest, the Great Charter, the Hundred Years' War, the Reformation, the Civil Wars and the Revolution, the Emancipation of the American Colonies from the Monarchy. ”

“ There is not a day which does not recall for us some great name in our country's history, some victory of peace or in war. Let us put ourselves in mind of a few of these—not necessarily of the most familiar or the most striking, but of some which more especially speak of movements and workers in the religious and philanthropic life of the nation. ”

“ Among other good things he said: "History is the grandest study in the world." That remark made the profoundest impression upon my student imagination. I said to myself, "If History is the grandest study in the world, that is exactly the study I want." The good President proved his statement to my satisfaction by showing the relation of Greek and Roman civilizations to the spread of Christianity and the education of Europe. ”