What is History, Now? Quotes

“Which stories we tell about history, who we celebrate and the ideas and values they embody determine the world we live in today.”
― Suzannah Lipscomb, What Is History, Now?

“Carr borrowed aspects of social science to suggest that the interpretive historian is not so much discovering as always ‘in a relation with’ the facts.”
― Suzannah Lipscomb, What Is History, Now?

“Empires’, then, can be marked on a map. ‘Imperialism’, by contrast, involves a set of coercive relationships that may exist even in the absence of direct rule.”
― Suzannah Lipscomb, What Is History, Now?

“British history, if judged by the publishing marketplace, might be thought to consist of only three epochs: the Tudors, the First World War and the Second World War.”
― Suzannah Lipscomb, What Is History, Now?

“What any culture chooses to make official and takes as a given about itself and its history is as telling as what it fails to notice or repudiates; reading between the lines reveals that there is meaning in the gaps in our histories as well as in the printed pages.”
― Suzannah Lipscomb, What Is History, Now?

“As George Orwell put it in 1984, ‘who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past’.”
― Suzannah Lipscomb, What Is History, Now?

“Labels like ‘antiquity’, ‘the Middle Ages’ or ‘early modern’ are not entirely unproblematic for historians of the West; but they are meaningless for vast parts of the world.”
― Suzannah Lipscomb, What Is History, Now?

“This book intends to prove the opposite: that history can be flexible, malleable, colourful and without bias – that history is, above all, interpretation. This is why this volume hosts a multiplicity of voices.”
― Suzannah Lipscomb, What Is History, Now?

“Not the past of the select few, but the past of the many, in order to demonstrate, share – shout from the rooftops – that history belongs to us all.”
― Suzannah Lipscomb, What Is History, Now?

“Carr wrote: ‘by and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation.”
― Suzannah Lipscomb, What Is History, Now?

“Statues … are not really about history at all, but are about how we see ourselves reflected in history: pride versus shame, good versus bad, heroes versus villains. Statues are not a record of history but of historical memory. They reflected what somebody at some point thought we should think.”
― Suzannah Lipscomb, What Is History, Now?

“it’s about refusing to accept a censored version of history that glorifies certain people and erases others.”
― Suzannah Lipscomb, What Is History, Now?

“it is when we persist in viewing the tainted past uncritically that we continue to sully the present.”
― Suzannah Lipscomb, What Is History, Now?

“facts are served as the historian wishes to serve them and that history is by and large interpretive.”
― Suzannah Lipscomb, What Is History, Now?