Historical Empathy Quotes

There's a difference between knowing what's on the page in a history book and actually feeling that page have curves and valleys.

For 'Rosa Luxemburg,' I read everything by and about her, but the first time I was stuck in that corset, I got an understanding of her that I'd never had before.

Like I'm always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can't do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, times was different.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.

How can we judge fairly of the characters and merits of men, of the wisdom or folly of actions, unless we have . . . an accurate knowledge of all particulars, so that we may live as it were in the times, and among the persons, of whom we read, see with their eyes, and reason and decide on their premises?

When I was five, we moved to Virginia and lived inside an old fort that was surrounded by a moat. So when I heard stories of American history, I felt as if those dramas were taking place right in my own backyard.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.

Good history is good story-telling. And good story-telling demands empathy; it requires understanding different actors, differing motivations, competing goals.

History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

The problem is when you try to impose today's standards on people living back then. It's the politically correct thing to do, but it was a different era, a different country then.

I think in this, definitely, because you are feeling how it felt to live in a completely different time. The mannerisms and the way that people behaved was quite different.

To view current events as a historian is to account for all perspectives, even those of your enemy

History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.

I know this is insane, but i somehow wish i had been in auschwitz with my parents so i could really know what they lived through! I guess it's some kind of guilt about having had an easier life than they did.

One test of a great work of history is does it make you feel like you have lived through the period

To hold the reader's attention, you have to bring the person who's reading the book inside the experience of the time: What was it like to have been alive then? What were these people like as human beings?

The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.

Ultimately it's a leap of faith and a leap of imagination to put yourself back in time into those conditions and situations and see how you would react.

History at its best is vicarious experience.

For me the Holocaust was not only a Jewish tragedy, but also a human tragedy. After the war, when I saw that the Jews were talking only about the tragedy of six million Jews, I sent letters to Jewish organizations asking them to talk also about the millions of others who were persecuted with us together - many of them only because they helped Jews.

If you really think about it, if we begin to teach history exactly the way that it happened - good, bad, ugly, no matter what - I believe that we're going to find that we are closer, more connected than we are apart.

You can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past. They lived in the present. It is their present, not our present, and they don't know how it's going to come out. They weren't just like we are because they lived in that very different time. You can't understand them if you don't understand how they perceived reality.

I love to live things, so I wanted to immerse myself and get into the mindset - and sandals - of my forefathers.

History asks us to imagine ourselves in a period, but it's a very different situation when you're in that period and faced with those situations.

Writing of history is our only heuristic principle. The Germans have a word for it, einfühlen. It is the ability to experience the past in the present and to recreate it. In my books, I have tried to recreate it in the most natural way possible: History must be integrated into the story without the weight of premonition.