The Historian and his Archives

Archives are not history; but the historian who fails periodically to refresh himself in the fresh stream of original records soon ceases to be an historian. It is, of course, true that records do not (as so often alleged) “speak for themselves.” No series of records, however complete, gives us more than a hint of past actuality; even the vast documentation now available for the history of international relations in the years 1933-1939 requires a trained imagination, both to link it together in consistent order, and still more to relate it to all those underlying factors— assumptions, human failings, prejudices, beliefs, ingrained habits—which go unrecorded and yet colour every recorded statement. The undertones, the overtones, the pattern into which events seem to fall: all these it is the historian’s business to bring out. But the records themselves—not necessarily, of course, only the written records—are fundamental; and the farther he gets away from the records, the more likely he is to be beguiled by theories and reconstructions of his own making.