In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech to the American Historical Association. The former president—himself a historian of no small talent—was dismayed by the specialization and dry scientism even then overtaking the discipline and addressed his remarks toward the possibility of “history as literature.” Historians, he argued, were not just compilers of dusty facts; they were, or should be, artists. Their task was to turn the undigested data of the past into something splendid and imperishable, in the same way that Michelangelo wrested transcendence from a block of marble. An aesthetic sense was necessary to accomplish anything meaningful: “vast and fundamental truths,” Roosevelt warned, “can be discerned and interpreted only by one whose imagination is as lofty as the soul of a Hebrew prophet.”
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