Top Highlights

• Political opinion and views about historical events ever have been and always must be closely connected. Past experience is the foundation on which our beliefs about the desirability of different policies and institutions are mainly based, and our present political views inevitably affect and colour our interpretation of the past.
• Historiography, as distinguished from historical research, is not only at least as much an art as a science; the writer who attempts it without being aware that his task is one of interpretation in the light of definite values also will succeed merely in deceiving and will become the victim of his unconscious prejudices.
• But in the end even those who never read a book and probably have never heard the names of the historians whose views have influenced them come to see the past through their spectacles. Certain beliefs, for instance, about the evolution and effects of trade unions, the alleged progressive growth of monopoly, the deliberate destruction of commodity ...
• inventions, the causes and effects of 'imperialism', and the role of the armament industries or of 'capitalists' in general in causing war, have become part of the folklore of our time. Most people would be greatly surprised to learn that most of what they believe about these subjects are not safely established facts but myths, launched from politi...
• Who has not heard of the 'horrors of early capitalism' and gained the impression that the advent of this system brought untold new suffering to large classes who before were tolerably content and comfortable?