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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.
Simon SchamaRead
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All the old history was written for the amusement of the ruling classes. The lower classes couldn't read, and their rulers didn't care about remembering what happened to them.
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Egypt gave birth to what later would become known as 'Western Civilization,' long before the greatness of Greece and Rome.
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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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India is, the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition. our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only.
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The tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible.
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