George Macaulay Trevelyan, OM, CBE, FRS, FBA (16 February 1876[2] – 21 July 1962), was a British historian. Trevelyan was the third son of Sir George Otto Trevelyan, 2nd Baronet, and great-nephew of Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose staunch liberal Whig principles he espoused in accessible works of literate narrative avoiding a consciously dispassionate analysis, that became old-fashioned during his long and productive career. The noted historian E. H. Carr considered Trevelyan to be one of the last historians of the Whig tradition. “The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today... The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow -- Autobiography of an Historian, An Autobiography and Other Essays (1949).” Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. One half who graduate from college never read another book. Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility. Never tell a young person that anything cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for someone ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing. I have two doctors, my left leg and my right. Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization. Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out. If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt.
Posted on: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 14:08:30 +0000
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