Historical method

“ While going over the same ground and drawing my lessons from the same historians, it is new matter so far as I have had the honor to present it to the American Historical Association.
A historian, to make a mark, must show some originality somewhere in his work. The originality may be in a method of investigation ”

“ All the dreary questions of the precise order in which history should be taught—whether backwards or forwards, local first or the reverse, may be brought up if one chooses to do so. But after all, these questions are not very fruitful. What we need most is the historical spirit. ”

“ In the meantime it is well to bear in mind that there is one important department of history which has always been frankly and unhesitatingly accepted as history and yet which has no stronger foundation than tradition, and tradition of the most formal kind. I allude to the early laws of most of the peoples who have become possessed of an historic civilisation. ”

“ With a set of facts about the social conditions of England in the Middle Ages the historian will seek to make a generalisation, to find a formula; the novelist will seek a different sort of synthesis and will try to reconstruct a world, to particularise, to catch a glimpse of human nature. Each will notice different things and follow different clues; for to the historian the past is the whole process of development that leads up to the present ”

“ History is developed by the historical phases of each nation, its progress, its stability, difficulties and high points, it is not due to men in a particular or providential manner. Its historical process and socioeconomic development expresses the historical phase of the nation. ”

“ History begins and ends with Man. Biographical approaches to the world's life are the oldest, and best beaten paths for youth to follow. Carlyle and Froude are among the champions of the biographical method of studying and teaching History. When Froude succeeded Freeman at Oxford the biographical idea was at once brought to the front. Froude quoted Carlyle as saying: "The history of mankind is the history of its great men; to find out these, clean the dirt from them, and place them on their proper pedestals, is the true function of the historian." ”

“ But the record of history also shows that men have repeatedly interfered and intervened in the historical process by discovery and invention. The historical record is subject to change. Man is not entirely free. Neither is he helplessly bound on the wheel of necessity, presently known as civilization. ”

“ For instance, when undertaking a survey of the causes of the French Revolution, we could, in amassing our material, include not only the history of medieval France but also that of Rome and Greece, which certainly would not be "necessary for our purpose," since we can comprehend the historical genesis of the Revolution from much more limited material. ”

“ It is of almost infinite importance to our history to secure, in their own language and conceptions, and even with their own predilections or prejudices from pioneers still living, all the reminiscent history available. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What our classical institutions pretend to give can and actually will be given to our youth with much more fruitful results by competent historical instruction, which must supply, not names and numbers alone, nor the mere history of dynasties and wars, but be in every sense of the word a true history of civilisation. ”

“ From hence does history derive its utility; for being, when truly written, a faithful record of the transactions of mankind, and the consequences that flowed from them, we are thence furnished with the means of judging what will be the probable effect of transactions, similar among ourselves. ”

“ The evidence of historic events which enter into tradition relates principally to the earliest periods, but much of it relates to periods well within the domain of history and yet reveals facts which history has either hopelessly neglected or misinterpreted. ”

“ Over and over again, in the local records, are examples to be found where history is in close contact with tradition, and I am far more inclined to question the evidence which proves the falseness of any authenticated tradition than I am to trust all the statements which do duty for history. ”

“ Where the historian uses the press or pounder of his historical learning, documentary lore, abstracts, synthesis, statistics, and other professional devices, to squeeze thousands and hundreds of thousands of little vital personal incidents into a dense and arbitrary conglomerate known as "a historical fact," "a social phenomenon," "a mass movement," "evolution," "the mind of the race," or "historical truth" in general, the chronicler sees only the individual cases and even finds them pleasing in themselves. ”

“ History and tradition are in accord, not in conflict; the gaps of history are filled by tradition—that tradition which was suitable and worthy of so great a hero, namely the ancient tradition told of all heroes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The theorist makes his generalisations out of the facts of the past, and talks about the laws that govern the movements of history and the things that determine progress and the goal to which human development is moving—but he is not a historian any more than the priest talking about Providence is a historian, although both these deal with interpretations of history. They are simply philosophers trying to interpret man’s experience of life to man. ”

“ If the accretion of myth around the lives of great historic personages, and the persistence of tradition in historic localities, may be accepted as one phase of the necessary relationship of tradition to history, we may proceed to inquire how far the unattached traditions, the folk-tales pure and simple, contain or are based upon historic details. ”

“ THE MATHEMATICS OF HISTORY
The universality of the law of History.
The law of History governs the process in all domains of human activity. Nations evolve, progress, decline and rise again, following some perfect cycles in the political, social, artistic, philosophical and scientific arenas. Nothing is the work of chance. The appearance and disappearance of great empires, the creation of architectural styles, the great discoveries, the great philosophical conceptions, obey a mechanism that is as precise as a clock. Up to now men have ignored it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When reading the industrial history we shall not be reading the religious history. In the one we shall find circumstances and events recorded which we do not find in the other, because all circumstances and events do not have significance equally for the development of industry and religion. Historical selection is, therefore, twofold,—the selection of a career to be depicted and of events and circumstances peculiarly relevant to that career. ”

“ The tendency of historians nowadays is to neglect completely the study of the influences on State of Man's domestic, social, industrial, religious, and intellectual life, and of the diverse effects on human life and institutions of the working of the political machinery. ”

“ In fact, much of the culture value of history depends on the training it affords in composition, and, by intimately connecting these two subjects, a double advantage is gained—the ability to comprehend historical material, and practice in effective expression. ”

“ Certainly, thousands of years before our day there were empires and kingdoms and city-states, showing considerable advancement in those intellectual pursuits which we call civilization or culture,—that is, in religion, learning, literature, political organization, and business; and such basic institutions as the family, the state, and society go back even further, past our earliest records, until their origins are shrouded in deepest mystery. Despite its brevity, modern history is of supreme importance. ”

“ In this general survey, we must confine ourselves to those mighty and celebrated nations who have attained [73] to a high degree of intellectual excellence; and we shall select and briefly state remarkable traits or extraordinary historical facts illustrative of the manners, social institutions, political refinement, and even political history of every nation, worthy of occupying a place in this sketch, in order the better to mark the progress of the intellectual principle in the peculiar culture and modes of thinking of each. ”

“ But history is not only philosophy, teaching by example; its true purpose is, also, to illustrate the general progress of society in knowledge and the arts, and the changes of manners and pursuits of men.
There is an imperfection, both in ancient and modern histories, and those of the best masters, in this respect. While they recite public transactions, they omit, to a great degree, what belongs to the civil, social, and domestic progress of men and nations. ”

“ The historians of culture are quite consistent in regard to their progenitors, the writers of universal histories, for if historical events may be explained by the fact that certain persons treated one another in such and such ways, why not explain them by the fact that such and such people wrote such and such books? Of the immense number of indications accompanying every vital phenomenon, these historians select the indication of intellectual activity and say that this indication is the cause. ”

“ We do not know as yet one half of those in existence, and many have never been described nor figured. Yet they afford every where, one of the most evident and certain base of historical researches, confirming traditions, or revealing the seats of former empires, their civilization, &c. ”

“ The duty of the historian is, not to decide if the newspapers are as good as they ought to be, but to measure their influence on the present, and to recognize their importance as an ample and contemporary record of the past. ”

“ The study of our own history is chiefly valuable for its moral significance and influence. It fixes our attention upon the organization and structure of our society, and carries the influence of other times on into our own. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A universal history is fitted to correct such defects as may be incident to that extreme specialism in historical writing which is now in fashion. The broad and concise treatment which a history of all times and peoples must adopt naturally leads to efforts to characterise the dominant features and tendency of an epoch or a movement, whether social, economic, or political. ”

“ It was the comprehensive speculations of twenty persons in the seventeenth century which entirely changed the notions of civilized nations throughout the world; it was the obscure labours of some poor scholars of the sixteenth century which founded historical criticism, and opened up a total revolution in ideas on the past history of man. ”

“ Each historian, according to his view of what constitutes a nation’s progress, looks for these conditions in the greatness, wealth, freedom, or enlightenment of citizens of France or some other country. But not to mention the historians’ contradictions as to the nature of this program—or even admitting that some one general program of these conditions exists—the facts of history almost always contradict that theory. ”

“ Of late an improved philosophy of history assigns them their proper place and significance as an index of evolution, and gives us the hopeful sign that notwithstanding the occasional irruption of man's destructive faculties, his progress is principally due to the subordination of the militant spirit. ”

“ This successive deliverance and gradual passage, for good and evil, from subordination to independence is a phenomenon of primary import to us, because historical science has been one of its instruments. ”

“ The history of the middle ages—a subject of which lectures are promised at some future period—is a theme replete with the interest to every one who would trace the moral and political progress of society. It was then that the elements which compose our present political system, though still in a state of fusion, were beginning to shape themselves into order. ”