Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Trade-off of the Day: History

Just how, though, do you present historical experience for the purpose of enlarging personal experience? To include too little information can render the whole exercise irrelevant. To include too much can overload the circuits and crash the system. The historian has got to strike a balance, and that means recognizing a trade-off between literal and abstract representation.

The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, by John Lewis Gaddis. p 12.

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