Papers by Nicholas Westbrook
THIS ESSAY ivas ivritten as the Minnesota Historical Society began the fabrication and installati... more THIS ESSAY ivas ivritten as the Minnesota Historical Society began the fabrication and installation of a major new gallery exhibit, "The Clothes Off Our Backs: A Minnesota Collection, which opened in September in the North Gallery on the third floor of the -societys main building at 690 Cedar Street. The exhibit was organized, researched, ivritten, and designed by Tim Brennan, Joan Seidl, and Nicholas Westbrook, exhibits group in the educational .services division, working with John Low of
Social Science History, 1976
The principal question we now face as a discipline may well be, “Can history recapture its romant... more The principal question we now face as a discipline may well be, “Can history recapture its romantic past?” The roots of that tradition are well known, extending back to Bancroft, Motley and Parkman, who came to the practice of history principally as men of letters. Avid readers of Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, these first American historians saw in their craft the obligation not to analyze history, but to recreate it, thus forging what Richard Hofstadter called their “imaginative relation with the past.…What they worked for was experience not philosophy… the moral drama of history was told in pictorial terms. The effort at historical discipline… rested upon the insatiable quest for the right, the relevant detail.…The technical… side of the work of these men came primarily to this: facts were valued not so much as ‘evidence,’ as proofs in some analytic scheme, but as veracious details for the recreation of some experience.”
Social Science History, 1976
The principal question we now face as a discipline may well be, “Can history recapture its romant... more The principal question we now face as a discipline may well be, “Can history recapture its romantic past?” The roots of that tradition are well known, extending back to Bancroft, Motley and Parkman, who came to the practice of history principally as men of letters. Avid readers of Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, these first American historians saw in their craft the obligation not to analyze history, but to recreate it, thus forging what Richard Hofstadter called their “imaginative relation with the past.…What they worked for was experience not philosophy… the moral drama of history was told in pictorial terms. The effort at historical discipline… rested upon the insatiable quest for the right, the relevant detail.…The technical… side of the work of these men came primarily to this: facts were valued not so much as ‘evidence,’ as proofs in some analytic scheme, but as veracious details for the recreation of some experience.”
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Papers by Nicholas Westbrook