History was not simply a catalogue of the dead and buried and benighted, but rather a vast new world to be pioneered; ..if you approached the past generously, so to speak–its people as humans, not facts, as modern in their time as we were in ours, who thought and felt as we do, the dead would live again, our equals, not our old-fashioned, hopelessly unenlightened, and backward inferiors. Humanity, to be fully known, had to be seen as changeless as well as ever changing.Tony Hendra
About This Quote
Ernest Renan , the French historian, novelist, and philosopher, was a pioneer of history as a human endeavor rather than as a series of facts. In an essay that he published in 1882, Renan set out to show that history could be approached with the same compassion and respect we bring to our own lives.
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