History as literature, and other essays

Chapter 2: PREFACE

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Essays, Letters & Speeches History - Other

About This Book

A series of essays and public addresses argues that historical writing should combine rigorous scholarship with literary power rather than be confined to technical science. The writer employs biological analogies and broad comparative perspectives to examine world movements, citizenship, national character, and the influence of names, while defending productive scholarship and a reverent search for truth. Several pieces provide literary and cultural criticism—on Dante, urban life, ancient Irish sagas—and include reviews of art and reflections on the intellectual foundations of the nineteenth century. The tone balances rhetorical vigor and moral seriousness with insistence on patient research to engage general readers and specialists alike.

PREFACE

In this volume I have gathered certain addresses I made before the American Historical Association, the University of Oxford, the University of Berlin, and the Sorbonne at Paris, together with six essays I wrote for The Outlook, and one that I wrote for The Century.

In these addresses and essays I have discussed not merely literary but also historical and scientific subjects, for my thesis is that the domain of literature must be ever more widely extended over the domains of history and science. There is nothing which in this preface I can say to elaborate or emphasize what I have said on this subject in the essays themselves.

Theodore Roosevelt.

Sagamore Hill,
July 4, 1913.