An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view.
Interpretation
A historian should engage deeply with their subject while also maintaining a perspective for clearer understanding.
This quote emphasizes the dual approach necessary for historians to analyze their subjects. By immersing themselves in the historical context of the event or period being studied, they can gain a richer understanding. However, it is also crucial to step back occasionally to gain an objective perspective, which allows for fresh insights and a more balanced interpretation of history.
In practice
During a lecture about the importance of historical context, you might reference this quote to illustrate how deeply engaging with subjects is critical for historians.
But sea power has never led to despotism. The nations that have enjoyed sea power even for a brief period-Athens, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, England, the United States-are those that have preserved freedom for themselves and have given it to others. Of the despotism to which unrestrained military power leads we have plenty of examples from Alexander to Mao.
The freedmen were not really free in 1865, nor are most of their descendants really free in 1965. Slavery was but one aspect of a race and color problem that is still far from solution here, or anywhere. In America particularly, the grapes of wrath have not yet yielded all their bitter vintage.
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.
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.
No big modern war has been won without preponderant sea power; and, conversely, very few rebellions of maritime provinces have succeeded without acquiring sea power.
Dream dreams and write them aye, but live them first.
In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early '60s seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not yet an American war.
If you were lost for America, there is nobody who could keep the army and the revolution [going] for six months.
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
My staff was unanimous in believing that Japan was on the point of collapse and surrender.
Thousand got away to other countries; thousands returned to Spain tempted by false promises of kindness. By the tens of thousands, these Spaniards died of neglect in the concentration camps.
Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled, and bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to manhood.
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