For me there is no greater subject than history. How a man can study it and not be forced to become a philosopher, I cannot tell. – George E. Wilson

God cannot alter the past, though historians can. – Samuel Butler, “Prose Observations”

No one can really know the life of his own day, let alone that of times long past. Always the historian sees as in a mirror darkly, the reds and the golds rendered drab by the shadows of time. – Earl R. Beck, On Teaching History in Colleges and Universities