An Exercise

An assignment for this week was to pick a famous quote about history from a given list and write a logical argument or defense.  

The historian depends on certain realities and comforts.  Some are ephemeral and physical - the smell of a leather-bound book, the sharp contrast of black gall ink on bleached linen paper.  One is visceral and immutable - the security of an extended intellectual community, the protection of a multiple participant dialogue.  The scholar of the past can depend on one fact - no historian works in a vacuum.  Unlike the tree in the forest, doomed to an eternity of philosophical inquiry made possible by the absence of an audience, the historian by nature of her profession has, at minimum, an inherent audience of peers who first listen and then continue to question.  Historians create a record defined by those who went before and subsequently altered by those who follow.  Philip Guedalla said of our craft, “History repeats itself; historians repeat each other.”  For in our search for the grail of truth, the answer to “what really happened” is discerned by repetition, not only of inquiry, but also of interpretation.  Only by layering observations compiled from different actors and interpreted by varied observers, can we hope to approach the horizon of historical understanding.