Hayden White

The kinds of narratives historians tend to fall back on constrain our ability to imagine alternatives to the way things have been, and to the way things are.

Historians are losing their audience, and searching for the next trend won’t win it back.

In contemporary publishing, novels fixated on the past rather than the present have garnered the most attention and prestige.

The more that historians make their own experiences an explicit part of their work, the harder it will become to let the sources speak clearly.

A lively defense of narrative history and the lived experience that informs historical writing.

The past does not speak to us; we speak for the past.

Historical narratives of the United States have never not been shaped by an anxiety about the end of it all. Are we a new Rome or a new Zion?

With so little documentary evidence about his life, he is a virtual blank slate upon which different people at different times have inscribed a variety of meanings.