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3b9f6d2
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Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.
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history
race-theory
sophism
final-solution
historians
marxism
totalitarianism
antisemitism
ideology
communism
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Hannah Arendt |
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27b7abc
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Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age.
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evolution
history
historians
progressives
conservatives
progressive
society
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Chuck Klosterman |
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ce112e9
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I began with the desire to speak with the dead.
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shakespeare
history
education
historians
knowledge
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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6408119
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Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest--fractionally more brave, one might say--about that 'other' cleansing of the regions and peoples that were ground to atoms between the upper and nether millstones of Hitlerism and Stalinism. One of the most objective chroniclers is Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University. In his view, it is still 'Operation Reinhardt,' or the planned destruction of Polish Jewry, that is to be considered as the centerpiece of what we commonly call the Holocaust, in which of the estimated 5.7 million Jewish dead, 'roughly three million were prewar Polish citizens.' We should not at all allow ourselves to forget the millions of non-Jewish citizens of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and other Slav territories who were also massacred. But for me the salient fact remains that anti-Semitism was the regnant, essential, organizing principle of all the other National Socialist race theories. It is thus not to be thought of as just one prejudice among many.
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prejudice
racism
history
bravery
honesty
accuracy
belarus
berlin-wall
operation-reinhard
polish-jews
slavic-peoples
timothy-d-snyder
yale-university
national-socialism
massacre
historians
ukraine
poland
holocaust
nazism
stalinism
antisemitism
jews
russia
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Christopher Hitchens |
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fbd899e
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When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving conception of 'greatness.' 'Greatness,' it seems, excludes the standards of right and wrong. For the 'great' man nothing is wrong, there is no atrocity for which a 'great' man can be blamed.
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right-or-wrong
napoleon
historians
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Leo Tolstoy |
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4cf6d5b
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Imagine, Dracula a pawn in the hands of the infidel. I wasted no time there-I learned everything I could about them, so that I might surpass them all. That was when I vowed to make history, not to be its victim.
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history
infidel
historians
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Elizabeth Kostova |
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7ccdb54
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It was always the best way of finding out information; just go and ask a woman who keeps her eyes and ears open and who likes to talk. It always worked. It was no use asking men; they simply were not interested enough in other people and the ordinary doings of people. That is why the real historians of Africa had always been the grandmothers, who remembered the lineage and the stories that went with it.
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historians
storytelling
gossip
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Alexander McCall Smith |