"History is about the past. Yet it exists only in the present – the moment of its creation as history provides us with a narrative constructed after the events with which it is concerned. The narrative must then relate to the moment of its creation as much as its historical subject. History presents an historian with the task of producing a dialogue between the past and the present. But as these temporal co-ordinates cannot be fixed, history becomes a continuous interaction between the historian and the past. As such, history can be seen as a process of evaluation whereby the past is always coloured by the intellectual fashions and philosophical concerns of the present. This shifting perspective on the past is matched by the fluid status of the past itself."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Dana Arnold, Reading Architectural History (2002), Ch. 1 : Reading the past : What is architectural history?
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/History
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
History
316 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by History →
Related Quotes
"History held counterexamples to any facile rule."
"History is nothing whatever but a record of what living persons have done in the past."
"No honest historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the hum…"
"History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided."
"Escapists take refuge in cliches such as “Human nature will never change” and “History always repeats itself!” Nevert…"
"There are two ways of summing up world history, the inner way and the outer way. Both have been at the mercy of scrib…"
"The past is a pointer to the future. If we can understand the past and follow the trend of development throughout his…"
"History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living."
"The sciences we are familiar with have been installed in a number of great 'continents'. Before Marx, two such contin…"
"Psychology has a long past, but only a short history."