"Historical periodization always tells a story. It is a narrative device for putting meaning into the flux of historical process - creating protagonists, heroes, pace, and plot. For this reason, the di..."
- James Ferguson
"People who are not historians sometimes think of history as the facts about the past. Historians are supposed to know otherwise. The facts are there, to be sure, but they are infinite in number and sp..."
- Paul A. Cohen
"Technology is often portrayed as an objective measure of development, and its advancement as something that can be examined outside of politics. But the history of technology, particularly military te..."
- Peter A. Lorge
"Our outsideness, after all, is a major part of what makes us different from the direct participants in history and enables us, as historians, to render the past intelligible and meaningful in ways tha..."
"Is it really true... that our aim as historians is in some sense to recapture past reality, “to retrieve the truth about the past?” If so, what do “past reality” and “the truth about the past” mean? H..."
"Where the Depression years had aroused a deep sense of concern over how American wealth was distributed and American society structured, the successive crises of the 1960s and early 1970s, by highligh..."
"Indebtedness among historians is a peculiar thing, however. We don’t simply, in mechanical fashion, inherit a body of knowledge, add something to it, and pass it on. We also question, test, and shake ..."
"I suggest that the Western impact, at least in nineteenth-century China, was overstated (and misstated) by an earlier generation of American historians. An especially egregious example of this, I argu..."
"...the modern bias in contemporary Western scholarship (which has spread to the rest of the world as well) insists upon focusing all attention on the formation of the modern world and ‘‘modernity.’’ B..."
"Perhaps the strangest manifestation of the Eurocentric approach to the history of military technology is ... the attempt to discern fundamental cultural roots in the distant past that have resulted in..."