Popular History

Louis Menand, in his introduction of To The Finland Station:

When you undertake historical research…your knowledge of the past—apart, occasionally, from a limited visual record and the odd unreliable survivor—comes entirely from written documents. You are almost completely cut off, by a wall of print, from the life you have set out to represent. You can’t observe historical events; you can’t question historical actors; you can’t even know most of what has not been written about. What has been written about therefore takes on an importance which may be spurious. A few lines in a memoir, a snatch of recorded conversation, a letter fortuitously preserved, an event noted in a diary: all become luminous with significance—even though these are just the bits that have floated to the surface. The historian clings to them, while somewhere below, the huge submerged wreck of the past sinks silently out of sight.

Sigmund Freud, 1937:

It almost looks as if analysis were the third of those “impossible” professions in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results. The other two, which have been known much longer, are education and government

Sorry to say it

The late psychoanalyst and Freud scholar Kurt Eissler, as quoted by Janet Malcolm in In the Freud Archives: 

But Anna Freud’s writing does not have the depth and passion of Freud’s. When reading Freud, one always feels that there is more there than actually is there. Anna Freud’s writing does not have this quality. This is because—I’m sorry to say it—she was a woman; she was not a genius.

The Making of a Revolutionary

Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity:

Out of 500 pupils in the school, Robespierre was chosen to deliver a ceremonial speech of welcome to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. … On the day of the visit, Robespierre, much rehearsed and very nervous, knelt outside Louis-Le-Grand at the head of the assembled body of the University of Paris, which was also kneeling and waiting for the royal party to arrive. It was June, but it was raining. Possibly it was for this reason that the royal couple remained inside their coach, acknowledged the speech of welcome with polite smiles, and promptly drove on… Robespierre, along with everyone else, had probably been waiting in the street for many hours. The new or borrowed clothes he was wearing would have been soaked through.

Hamiltonian Means to Achieve Jeffersonian Ends

David Labaree:

The Whig Party was a prime mover at the national and state levels in efforts to promote development of the market economy (by supporting construction of canals and turnpikes to spur trade and by supporting the tariff to protect industry) while simultaneously supporting development of new institutions to soften the impact of the market on society. … Whiggism broadly conceived was a particular stance toward progress that cut across party lines, if not across class lines. At its heart was a desire to reconcile the market economy with the republic, to develop an approach that would accommodate the one without destroying the other.

John McPhee on working with New Yorker editor William Shawn in the 1960s:

In discussing a long fact piece, he said, often enough, “How do you know?” and “How would you know?” and “How can you possibly know that?” He was saying clearly enough that any nonfiction writer ought always to hold those questions in the forefront of his mind.