David Grann Quotes

Unfortunately, historians have become so absorbed in detailed research that they have tended to neglect the job of building larger-scale maps of the past.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

We need to read history from the source.

History is the shank of the social sciences.

Leave history to historians.

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

I am a historian. I do a lot of research, and I try to get it right.

So this was the big secret historians keep to themselves: historical research is wildly seductive and fun. There's a thrill in the process of digging, then piecing together details like a puzzle.

Now, whenever you read any historical document, you always evaluate it in light of the historical context.

When you tell people you're in history, they give you this pained expression because that was the course they hated in high school. But history can be exciting, intellectually rigorous, and fun.

As a historian, I love every little detail, but whole long passages about wood paneling and journeys on horseback and every stop at every inn had to go out the window. I decided the history in the books should be like spice in a soup - a little went a long way. Like cilantro.

You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.

I once interviewed David Herbert Donald, the Lincoln historian, and we talked about how one deals with the secondary sources and the previous biographies. He said something which kept coming back to me as I worked on Cleopatra, which was: 'There's no further new material; there are only new questions.'

We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.

Confronted by an unknowable, historians demand evidence, witnesses, corroboration.

As historians, we spend days in archives, gazing at account books. We train would-be historians in the arts of deciphering letters and documents, early Latin, scribal handwriting, medieval French.

I'm interested in history.

I would love to be an historian. I'm a bit of a history geek and love books and programmes on the subject.

The historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it.

I decided that what I really wanted to do was to make my writing in history deeper, if that's the right word to use. And that is what I did.

History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.

I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd.

Historians will handle a much wider range of sources than a biographer and will be covering a broader spectrum of events, time, peoples.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

I should add that it is open to debate whether what we call the writing of history these days is truly scientific.