“In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not.”
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Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does not expect, nor often get.
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So I have cultivated the vast garden of human experience which is history, without troubling myself overmuch about laws, essential first causes, or how it is all coming out.
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Too rigid specialization is almost as bad for a historian's mind, and for his ultimate reputation, as too early an indulgence in broad generalization and synthesis.
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Historical methodology, as I see it, is a product of common sense applied to circumstances.
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