Conclusions to blupete's Essay
"An Essay on History"
"No anchor, no cable, no fences, avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome, are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign? London and Paris and New York must go the same way." (From Emerson's Essays.)Fables can, of course, make for interesting reading; but if one wants a true account of the past one generally must first carry out some research on the historian (just as one should on all writers) before plunging into his books. A person can not go wrong if he or she sticks to the classics, which by definition are those which have been tested with time.13 A sampling:
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