An apology offered and, equally important, received is a step towards reconciliation and, sometimes, recompense. Without that process, hurts can rankle and fester and erupt into their own hatreds and wrongdoings.
Margaret MacmillanRead
When I first read Barbara Tuchman's 'The Guns of August' in the autumn of 1963, it was as though history went from black and white to Technicolor.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote illustrates the transformative power of literature in understanding history more vividly.
Margaret Macmillan's observation about reading Barbara Tuchman's 'The Guns of August' serves as a testament to how literature can enhance our perception of historical events, making them feel more real and colorful rather than dull and flat. The metaphor of history transitioning from black and white to Technicolor suggests that engaging narratives can evoke deeper emotional responses and bring the past to life in a way that mere facts cannot.
Themes
HistoryLiteratureUnderstandingVividTransformative
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture about the impact of literature on history education.
More from Margaret Macmillan
All quotes βClimate change respects no borders.
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War is a crucial, deeply ingrained part of human history. It has to be understood.
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There was that argument that if we had more women in positions of authority, the world would be a nicer place. And then we got Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Indira Gandhi. When women become acclimatised to war, they can become every bit as ruthless as men.
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Theodore Roosevelt's policy to build a two-ocean navy confirmed that the old-style isolationism of the founders had not survived the modern, increasingly globalized world.
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If we don't take responsibility for each other, it seems to me the future is going to be even bleaker.
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The historical profession is nowhere famous for its tolerance, but there are not many countries where historians can expect to pay for their opinions with penal servitude or the firing squad.
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The war for our Union, with all the constitutional issues which it settled, and all the military lessons which it gathered in, has throughout its dilatory length but one meaning in the eyes of history. It freed the country from the social plague which until then had made political development impossible in the United States. More and more, as the years pass, does the meaning stand forth as the sole meaning.
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Yesterday, December seventh, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.
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Cleopatra had one great advantage. She lived at a time when female sovereigns were not anomalies. And when women enjoyed rights they would not again enjoy for another 2,000 years. You could call them early feminists, if I may use a dirty word.
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In Brazil, the history of the interaction between blancos and indios - whites and Indians - often reads like an extended epitaph. Tribes were wiped out by disease and massacres; languages and songs were obliterated.
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It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master
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