"There are not many historians who matter. Not many whose works have changed the way people see themselves. Of that little list, there is an even smaller number whose works have mattered to those in another society. The obscure American naval captain Alfred Thayer Mahan was one. His Strategy of Sea Power, published in 1890, had earned him honorary degrees in Oxford and Cambridge by 1893: Mahan told an anxious British public what it most wanted to hear about its navy. Denis Mack Smith is another. His Cavour and Garibaldi, published in 1954, told many Italians what they did not want to hear, but told them at a special point in their history when they had no choice but to listen. Denis Mack Smith became and has remained one of the most important historians of Italy."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Jonathan Steinberg, 'The Art of Denis Mack Smith', London Review of Books, Vol. 7 No. 9 (23 May 1985)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Denis_Mack_Smith
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Denis Mack Smith
Denis Mack Smith CBE FBA FRSL (born 3 March 1920 – July 11, 2017) was an English historian, specialising in the history of Italy from the Risorgimento onwards. He is best known for studies of Garibaldi and Cavour and of Mussolini, and for his single-volume Modern Italy: A Political History. He was named Grand Official of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 1996.
13 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Denis Mack Smith →
Related Quotes
"[Mussolini] forcibly denounced those socialists who thought religion a matter for individual conscience or had their …"
"[Mussolini] brought a radical Marxist strand to the Avanti! newspaper, soon doubling its circulation. With a growing …"
"The election [of 1919] indicated that the prevailing sentiment in the country was to the left and Mussolini acknowled…"
"Lenin was the contemporary politician whom [Mussolini] most admired and he studied the Russian revolution closely to …"
"Mussolini had once belonged to the Bolshevik wing of the Italian Socialist party and still in 1924 confessed admirati…"
"[In 1938] Mussolini anti-clericalism was thus reassuring itself. Sometimes he now acknowledged that he was an outrigh…"
"The Mussolini of 1944 reasserted the socialist beliefs of his youth because he now felt that he had been cheated by t…"
"Bombacci had once been a friend and disciple of Lenin and revived the story that, according to Lenin, Mussolini had b…"
"[Mussolini’s] desire for revenge against the bourgeoisie was genuine enough; his intention was to inject the germs of…"
"Always an extremist, [Mussolini] inclined to the belief of Babeuf and Blanqui in violent insurrection by a minority i…"