The Revolutions of 1848-49 [antikvár]

GENERAL EDITORS' PREFACE Historical writing is based on the control of evidence and commentary. Everything that has happened in the past is potentially historical evidence, and it therefore follows that the historian must apply rigorous selection if his story is to have intelligible form. The inroads of time and common sense greatly reduce the quantity of evidence that is effectively available; but what is left still demands discernment, if its presentation is not to be self-defeating in volume and variety. Even the residue left from this process of irrational and rational refinement does not tell its own story. Documents may speak for themselves, but they say different things to different listeners. The historian's second task is commentary, by means of which he completes the interpretation of the evidence which he has previously selected. Here he makes explicit the insights which have guided his choice of what to include and what to omit. Here he may go beyond what have hitherto been accepted as the common-sense limits of historical territory; the history of public events is extended to the history of private thoughts and beyond this to the historical analysis of instinctive, unreasoned attitudes, and to the gradations of man's experience between these extremes. By this extension of its range history as a discipline has moved some way to meet sociology, borrowing some of the sociologist's methods to do so. As a result of the processes by which the historian has become increasingly self-conscious and self-critical students are introduced nowadays not only to the conclusions drawn from new historical exploration, but to the foundations on which these conclusions rest. This has led in turn to the proliferation of collections of historical evidence for senior students, mainly documentary evidence of a familiar kind rather than the visual and aural records which are made available to younger age-groups. The question has already been asked whether any further series of this kind is needed. The volumes to be included in this series will effectively prompt an affirmative answer by their choice of significant subjects which, as they accumulate, will provide the basis for comparative study. Each title will authoritatively present sufficient material to excite but not exhaust the curiosity of the serious student. The passages chosen vii