I think one of the things that it is most important for historians to do is to deconstruct myths, and that when you get nationalist historiography, a… - John Elliott

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I think one of the things that it is most important for historians to do is to deconstruct myths, and that when you get nationalist historiography, as in Serbia for instance, casting people in the role of permanent victims, and creating a very narrow focus, that’s really dangerous. It seems to me that our role is constantly to question the orthodoxy of the day.

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About John Elliott

(23 June 1930 – 10 March 2022) was a British historian and Hispanist who was Regius Professor Emeritus at the University of Oxford.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Sir John Huxtable Elliott Sir John Elliott John Huxtable Elliott J.H.Elliott

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Additional quotes by John Elliott

In the second half of the 17th century, the Catalans saw that the relationship with Spain had failed, and so they rebelled against Philip V; then they realized that the French were no different. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Catalans began to see the opportunities that being in Spain presented. I think that, like the Scots, they took advantage of those opportunities. But historians are not prophets, and it now looks as though our two countries could break up.

The younger generation think in terms of the present and the future, and they’ve lost a sense of what happened before their lifetimes. They’ve lost any notion of the complexities of the past, and the fact that statesmen were struggling with similar problems in the 17th century as in the late 20th – threats to the unity of a nation state that was moving towards the form of development that it would reach in the 19th century.

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By definition a historian must be curious; that is what makes us look into the heart of societies. I think that I was surprised by the relative ease with which Spain moved from dictatorship to democracy after the death of Franco. But thinking about the impact of civil wars on societies I have reached the conclusion that the generation that grows up after a civil war has such terrible memories of what happened that it does everything possible to prevent a repetition in the future.

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