Uploaded February 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
‘I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved... slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves at a pinch to the order I wish to give them’.
Antoine Roquetin the historian in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea.
The classic formulation is that ‘primary sources’ are more useful than ‘secondary sources’ because the primary sources were produced by people who experienced the events first hand. Of course, without those primary sources we wouldn’t know anything. However, do those living through an event in the past really have a better understanding of what is happening and of what is important and what isn’t?
David Lowenthal once said that history is both more and less than the past. Less because history is only selected bits about the past, but it is also more than the past because history has meaning that the past does not. This meaning can only be derived from the power of hindsight, the work of historians. If you want to know history, first know the historian.
‘I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved... slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves at a pinch to the order I wish to give them’.
Antoine Roquetin the historian in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea.
The classic formulation is that ‘primary sources’ are more useful than ‘secondary sources’ because the primary sources were produced by people who experienced the events first hand. Of course, without those primary sources we wouldn’t know anything. However, do those living through an event in the past really have a better understanding of what is happening and of what is important and what isn’t?
David Lowenthal once said that history is both more and less than the past. Less because history is only selected bits about the past, but it is also more than the past because history has meaning that the past does not. This meaning can only be derived from the power of hindsight, the work of historians. If you want to know history, first know the historian.
