The Content of the Form Quotes

“In order to qualify as historical, an event must be susceptible to at least two narrations of its occurrence. Unless at least two versions of the same set of events can be imagined, there is no reason for the historian to take upon himself the authority of giving the true account of what really happened. The authority of the historical narrative is the authority of reality itself; the historical account endows the reality with form and thereby makes it desirable by the imposition upon its processes of the formal coherency that only stories possess.”
― Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

“Far from providing us with grounds for choosing among different conceptions of history, the human and social sciences merely beg the question of history’s meaning, which, in one sense, they were created to resolve. Therefore, to appeal to sociology, anthropology, or psychology for some basis for determining an appropriate perspective on history is rather like basing one’s notion of the soundness of a building’s foundations on the structural properties of its second or third story.”
― Hayden White , The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

“If one if is going to “go to history,” one had better have an address in mind rather than go wandering around the streets of the past like a flaneur. Historical flaneurisme is undeniably enjoyable, but the history we are living today is no place for tourists. If you are going to “go to history,” you better have a clear idea of which history, and you had better have a pretty good notion as to whether it is hospitable to the values you carry into it.”
― Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation