Historiography Quotes

“The fatal weakness of most psychiatric historiographies lies in the historians' failure to give sufficient weight to the role of coercion in psychiatry and to acknowledge that mad-doctoring had nothing to do with healing.”

“The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he lived out his life formed part of the rituals of his power. The disciplinary methods reversed this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination.”

“Rising up, rising down! History shambles on! What are we left with? A few half-shattered Greek stelae; Trotsky's eyeglasses; Gandhi's native-spun cloth, Cortes' pieces of solid gold (extorted from their original owner, Montezuma); a little heap of orange peels left on the table by the late Robespierre; John Brown's lengthily underlined letters; Lenin's bottles of invisible ink; one of Di Giovanni's suitcases, with an iron cylinder of gelignite and two glass tubes of acid inside; the Constitution of the Ku Klux Klan; a bruised ear (Napoleon pinched it with loving condescension)... And dead bodies, of course. (They sing about John Brown's body.) Memoirs, manifestoes, civil codes, trial proceedings, photographs, statues, weapons now aestheticized by that selfsame history - the sword of Frederick the Great, and God knows what else. Then dust blows out of fresh graves, and the orange peels go grey, sink, wither, rot away. Sooner or later, every murder becomes quaint. Charlemagne hanged four and a half thousand "rebels" in a single day, but he has achieved a storybook benevolence. And that's only natural: historiography begins after the orange has been sucked,; the peeler believes in the "great and beautiful things," or wants to believe; easy for us to believe likewise, since dust reduced truth and counterfeit to the same greyness - caveat emptor. But ends remain fresh, and means remain inexplicable. Rising up and rising down! And whom shall I save, and who is my enemy, and who is my neighbor?”

“Good historians...have the future in their bones”

“The distinction between "paid labor" and "housework" implied in working-class men's yearning for the domestic ideal persisted in later-nineteenth-century analyses of women's unpaid labor and was eventually replicated in Capital. Because wives' work was laregely unpaid, and because husbands came to the marketplace as the "possessors" of their wives' labor, Marx did not address the role of housework in the labor exchange that led to surplus value. Neither did he attend to the dynamics that permitted the husband to lay claim, in the price of his own labor, to the value of his wife's work.”

“As historians, our aim is to do our utmost to understand and elucidate past reality. At the same time, in pursuit of this goal, we must use ordering concepts that by definition inevitably introduce an element of distortion. I believe that our task as historians is to choose concepts that combine a maximum of explanatory power with a minimum of distortional effect.”

“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? How does the historian’s understanding of “reality” and “truth” differ—as most surely it does—from that of the direct participant? And what implications does this difference have for what we do as historians? It is not likely that questions of this sort will ever be finally answered. Yet clearly we must keep asking such questions if we are to maintain the highest levels of honesty and self-awareness concerning our work as historians.”

“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 technology, has been deeply inflected by nationalist sentiment.”

“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 speak, if at all, in conflicting, often unintelligible, voices. It is the task of the historian to reach back into this incoherent babel of facts, choose the ones that are important, and figure out what it is they say.”