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A few hints as to the craft may be useful to budding historians. First and foremost, get writing! Young scholars generally wish to secure the last fa… - Samuel Eliot Morison
" "A few hints as to the craft may be useful to budding historians. First and foremost, get writing! Young scholars generally wish to secure the last fact before writing anything, like General McClellan refusing to advance (as people said) until the last mule was shod. It is a terrible strain, isn’t it, to sit down at a desk, with your notes all neatly docketed, and begin to write? You pretend to your wife that you mustn’t be interrupted; but, actually, you welcome a ring of the telephone, a knock at the door, or a bellow from the baby as an excuse to break off. Finally, after smoking sundry cigarettes and pacing about the house two or three times, you commit a lame paragraph or two to paper. By the time you get to the third, one bit of information you want is lacking. What a relief! Now you must go back to the library or the archives to do some more digging. That’s where you are happy! And what you turn up there leads to more questions and prolongs the delicious process of research. Half the pleas I have heard from graduate students for more time or another grant-in-aid are mere excuses to postpone the painful drudgery of writing.
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About Samuel Eliot Morison
Samuel Eliot Morison (July 9, 1887 – May 15, 1976) was an American historian noted for his works of maritime history and American history that were both authoritative and popular. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1912, and taught history at the university for 40 years. He won Pulitzer Prizes for Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942), a biography of Christopher Columbus, and John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography (1959). In 1942, he was commissioned to write a history of United States naval operations in World War II, which was published in 15 volumes between 1947 and 1962. Morison wrote the popular Oxford History of the American People (1965), and co-authored the classic textbook The Growth of the American Republic (1930) with Henry Steele Commager.
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Samuel Morison
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Additional quotes by Samuel Eliot Morison
The situation in China was full of explosives, the handling of which required delicacy. Shortly before the actual surrender the Japanese withdrew their forces to the Yangtze Valley and to North China, where the Chinese Communists demanded that they receive the Japanese surrender. General Okamura, commander of the North China Area Army, refused, but on 17 August let it be known that he would surrender to Chiang Kai-shek. Unfortunately, the Generalissimo and his Nationalist armies were far distant, in southwest China. A Japanese puppet Chinese government with its own "Peace Preservation Troops" further complicated matters. And although the United States was willing to assist the Nationalist government to reestablish control over Chinese territory, it was fearful of being involved in a civil war.
To one and all, then, of the British, Canadian and United States Navies, Air Forces and Merchant Marines, and to the gallant ships and squadrons of other Allied nations operating under their command, and to the scientists, shipbuilders and builders of aircraft- this historian, who has followed them from the humiliating winter of 1941-1942 to the glorious summer of 1945, can only say: - "Well done, aye, magnificently done; and the free world is your debtor!"
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And although American historians cannot hope, as Theodore Roosevelt did, to “watch the nearing chariots of the champions,” or to look forward to the day when “for us the war-horns of King Olaf shall wail across the flood, and the harps sound high at festivals in forgotten halls,” we may indeed “show how the land which the pioneers won slowly and with incredible hardship was filled in two generations by the overflow from the countries of western and central Europe.” We may describe the race, class, and religious conflicts that immigration has engendered, and trace the rise of the labor movement with a literary art that compels people to read about it.You do not need chariots and horsemen, harps and war-horns, to make history interesting.
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