I see it as my job to try to make history to be a popular thing. The longer I keep going the less weird it will be to be a female historian.
Lucy WorsleyRead
There's a big mistake that people make with history, which is to think that people in the past were just like us, but wearing crinolines. They lived in different worlds.
Interpretation
What this quote means
People often mistakenly believe that historical figures were just like modern individuals, overlooking their unique contexts and perspectives.
Lucy Worsley's quote highlights the misconception that people from the past shared the same thoughts, feelings, and experiences as people today. While they may have similar human traits, the environments, cultures, and societal norms of their times greatly influenced their lives and decisions, thus they cannot be judged by modern standards or perspectives.
Themes
HistoryPerspectiveContextUnderstandingSociety
In practice
Example use cases
During a history class, to emphasize the importance of understanding the social context of historical events.
More from Lucy Worsley
All quotes βMy ideal viewer is an 11-year-old girl who, like me, was once reading a book by Jean Plaidy and might be in the position of deciding what to make of the world and what to do with her life.
Lucy WorsleyRead
Similar quotes
Laila Lalami has fashioned an absorbing story of one of the first encounters between Spanish conquistadores and Native Americans, a frightening, brutal, and much-falsified history that here, in her brilliantly imagined fiction, is rewritten to give us something that feels very like the truth.
Salman RushdieRead
I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.
Junot DiazRead
Oftentimes, a history book in school will talk about the Underground Railroad as if it's one sentence. But thousands of people decided to run, and they single-handedly changed the trajectory of our nation. By running to the North, they put a face to slavery, which recruited a lot of abolitionists.
Jurnee Smollett-BellRead
No history is mute. No matter how much they own it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth. Despite deafness and ignorance, the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is.
Eduardo GaleanoRead
The Civil War created in this country what had never existed before - a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union; it was the rebirth of the Union.
Woodrow WilsonRead
For it was in the golden prime Of good Haroun Alraschid.
Alfred Lord TennysonRead