history and historians

What the great historians give us . . . is a renewed sense of sorrow and anger and pity for history’s victims—for some luckless middle-aged Frenchman standing in the cold gray, shivering as he watches the members of his family being tied up and having their heads cut off. . . . It is not for history to supply us with a sense of history.  Life always supplies us with a sense of history.  It is for history to supply us with a sense of life.

Adam Gopnik

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