Excerpt from Congress of Arts and Science, Universal Exposition, St. Louis, 1904, Vol. 2 of 8

All Of the many ways of writing history may be reduced to two. There are those who write history, as there are those who read it, only for the sake of the story. Their study is of plot, their narrative goes by ordered sequence and seeks the dramatic order Of events men appear, in their View, always in organized society, under leaders and subject to common forces making this way or that; details are for the intensification of the impression made by the main move ment in mass; there is the unity and the epic progress of The Decline and Fall, or the crowded but always ordered composition Of one of Macaulay's canvases; cause and effect move Obvious and majestic upon the page, and the story is of the large force-of nations. This is history embodied in events, centering in the large transactions of epochs or Of peoples. It is history in one kind, upon which there are many variants. History in the other kind devotes itself to analy sis, to interpretation, to the illumination Of the transactions of which it treats by lights let in from every side. It has its own standard Of measurement in reckoning transactions great or small, bases its assessments, not upon the numbers involved or the noise and reputa tion Of the day itself in which they occurred, SO much as upon their intrinsic significance, seen now in after days, as an index of what the obscure men of the mass thought and endured, indications Of the forces making and to be made, the intimate biography Of daily thought. Here interest centres, not so much in what happened as in What underlay the happening; not so much in the tides as in the silent forces that lifted them. Economic history is Of this quality, and the history Of religious belief, and the history Of literature, where it traces the map Of Opinion, whether in an age of certainty or in an age Of doubt and change.

The interest Of history in both kinds is essentially the same. Each in its kind is a record Of the human spirit. In one sort we seek that spirit manifested in action, where effort is organized upon the great scale and leadership displayed. It stirs our pulses to be made aware of the mighty forces, whether of exaltation or of passion, that play through what men have done. In the other sort Of history we seek the Spirit of man manifested in conception, in the quiet tides of thought and emotion making up the minor bays and inlets of our various life Of complex circumstance, in the private accumulation Of events which lie far away from the sound of drum or trumpet and constitute no part of the pomp of great affairs. The interest of human history is that it is human. It is a tale that moves and quickens us.

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