So I have cultivated the vast garden of human experience which is history, without troubling myself overmuch about laws, essential first causes, or how it is all coming out.

Too rigid specialization is almost as bad for a historian's mind, and for his ultimate reputation, as too early an indulgence in broad generalization and synthesis.

America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else when discovered it was not wanted and most of the exploration for the next fifty years was done in the hope of getting through or around it. America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy.

If a lecturer, he wishes to be heard if a writer, to be read. He always hopes for a public beyond that of the long-suffering wife.

Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians much more than that it does not expect, nor often get.

Historical methodology, as I see it, is a product of common sense applied to circumstances.

The freedmen were not really free in 1865, nor are most of their descendants really free in 1965. Slavery was but one aspect of a race and color problem that is still far from solution here, or anywhere. In America particularly, the grapes of wrath have not yet yielded all their bitter vintage.

A few hints as to the craft may be useful to budding historians. First and foremost, get writing!

Dream dreams and write them aye, but live them first.

America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy.

Skepticism is an important historical tool. It is the starting point of all revision of hitherto accepted history.

An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view.

He [Columbus] enjoyed long stretches of pure delight such as only a seaman may know, and moments of high, proud exultation that only a discoverer can experience.

One learns more from defeat than from victory.

If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worthwhile.