Stephanie Coontz Quotes

While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.

As a historian, I've spent much of my career warning people about the dangers of nostalgia.

Can we ever understand the past, or do we just endlessly rework it to suit us in the present?

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

I can read a newspaper article, and it might trigger something else in my mind. I often like to choose in historical fiction things or subject matter I don't feel have been given a fair shake in history.

The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.

History tends to take the simplest possible view. As soon as you start to scratch the surface of any historical event, it starts to become more and more complicated, which is not the stuff of Hollywood films. Complications tend to break down the budget.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

We can be revisionist, and that's a good thing to be at times, but we shouldn't airbrush our history, so we can only make judgments in the objective conditions of that time.

Of course history is easily manipulated - though that makes it even more important for us to know what actually happened.

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

Any child knows that history can only be a reduced representation of reality, but it must be a true one, not distorted by queer lenses.

History is, of course, a made thing. It does not exist by itself in anything like a recognizable form.

History is neither a political fable in which all the brothers are valiant and all the sisters virtuous, nor is it a tabloid expose, full of crimes and follies, signifying nothing but victimization. There is, I must admit, a caustic delight in unveiling the frailties of our Jeffersons and our Lincolns, but the delight turns malevolent when it serves only to strip the American past of anything remarkable or exceptional, or when it demeans or discourages civic engagement and confidence.

History is a battleground... but it has always been the case. Remembering is a radical act. Choosing what is important and what belongs in the overstuffed metaphorical dustbin of history is of vital importance.

Selective memory has always been the problem. An insistence on seeing some people and movements as the sum only of their brightest and most glorious moments, and others as unmitigated villains, makes for a vision of history that is tragically incomplete.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

When you revise history, you lose it.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

History is not just a story related by a fool.

One duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

We often do not get the first draft of history right.

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

Learning from history is impossible if the narrative is wrong.