The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.
Simon SchamaRead
From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.
Interpretation
What this quote means
History is not just about remembering the past; it is meant to provoke thought and understanding.
Simon Schama emphasizes that history serves a dual purpose: it is not merely about recounting events as nostalgic stories, but it is also an invitation to engage critically with the past. By encouraging reflection, history can help us understand the complexities of human nature and societal developments.
Themes
HistoryThoughtReflectionUnderstandingNostalgia
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of education, you could use this quote to emphasize the role of historical knowledge in critical thinking.
More from Simon Schama
All quotes βIn its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present.
Simon SchamaRead
Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation - but rather, for the vast majority, the adventure of living in between.
Simon SchamaRead
I understood when I was quite small that there were two special things about the Jews. That we'd endured for over 3,000 years despite everything that had been thrown at us, and that we had an extraordinarily dramatic story to tell.
Simon SchamaRead
History is admirably dangerous. It is not the soft option. Teachers need to be grown up and brave. Sensitivity is fine, but it stops at the door of honest narrative.
Simon SchamaRead
History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.
Simon SchamaRead
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In a typical history book, black Americans are mentioned in the context of slavery or civil rights. There's so much more to the story.
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Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case... we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two.
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History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.
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I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.
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The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interest, where any chosen emphasis supports some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial, or national or sexual.
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