“Yet enthusiasm is no excuse for the historian going off balance. He should remind the reader that outcomes were neither inevitable nor foreordained, but subject to a thousand changes and chances.”
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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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