"This failure to recognize the true variety of historical source materials was his chief weakness as an historian. No one can read everything, but everyone should be consciously aware of all that exists waiting to be read. Whenever Butterfield turned to the technical tasks of the professional historian, a theme on which he spoke with firmness and sense, he talked only about letters and dispatches and gave no indication that he knew anything else to exist. History written on that basis cannot help but remain restricted and limited, and no major work of reconsideration, innovation or wider-ranging authority can be thus written except perhaps within the realm of that diplomatic history which Butterfield so rightly regarded as insufficient for a life's work."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Historians from EnglandPhilosophers from EnglandUniversity of Cambridge facultyPeople from LeedsChristians from the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Geoffrey Elton, 'Herbert Butterfield and the Study of History', The Historical Journal, Vol. 27, No. 3 (September 1984), p. 741
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Herbert_Butterfield
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Herbert Butterfield
Herbert Butterfield (October 7, 1900 – July 20, 1979) was a British historian and philosopher of history who is remembered chiefly for a slim volume entitled, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931).
52 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Herbert Butterfield →
Related Quotes
"It is like the Bishop who said that if we totally disarmed he had too high an opinion of human nature to think that a…"
"The hardest strokes of heaven fall in history upon those who imagine that they can control things in a sovereign mann…"
"Humanism and Humanitarianism, Liberalism and Internationalism...emerge as a result of a tendency to translate into se…"
"One of the paradoxes of history has been the way in which the name of England has come to be so closely associated wi…"
"But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousne…"
"Much as it may hurt us, we really have no choice but to move further to a more positive kind of internationalism, whi…"
"Considering the part played by the sciences in the story of our Western civilization, it is hardly possible to doubt …"
"The raconteur knows too well that, if he investigates the truth of the matter, he is only too likely to lose his good…"
"The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the e…"
"About the scientific revolution: it “outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance …"