What distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is generalization.
Edward Hallett CarrRead
History consists of a corpus ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish in the fishmonger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.
Interpretation
What this quote means
History is shaped by the interpretation of facts gathered by historians from various sources.
This quote emphasizes that history is not just a collection of objective facts; rather, it is actively constructed by historians who interpret and present these facts in particular ways. Just as a chef might prepare a dish according to their preferences, historians too curate and shape narratives based on their understanding, biases, and the contexts in which they operate, suggesting that history is a subjective account of the past rather than an absolute truth.
Themes
HistoryInterpretationFactsNarrativeSubjectivityHistorian
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on historiography, you might use this quote to discuss how different historians interpret the same events.
More from Edward Hallett Carr
All quotes →History is the long struggle of man, by exercise of his reason, to understand his environment and to act upon it. But the modern period has broadened the struggle in a revolutionary way. Man now seeks to understand, and act on, not only his environment, but himself; and this has added, so to speak, a new dimension to reason and a new dimension to history.
Edward Hallett CarrRead
Similar quotes
All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.
Muhammad AliRead
The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end.
T. S. EliotRead
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.
W. E. B. Du BoisRead
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
Julian BarnesRead
When we dwell on the enormity of the Second World War and its victims, we try to absorb all those statistics of national and ethnic tragedy. But, as a result, there is a tendency to overlook the way the war changed even the survivors' lives in ways impossible to predict.
Antony BeevorRead
My father's father fled a pogrom in Russia in the early 20th century and was welcomed to the United States. So was my stepmother, who escaped as a young girl from Communist Hungary in 1950.
Antony BlinkenRead