Course Guide ~ HIST 330 / Nations and Nationalism

"...a wise old professor outlined for the class in historiography three major aspects of the subject: (1) the assembling and testing of source material, (2) the synthesizing of this material into a logical pattern, and (3) its transmission to the reader. He compared this three-fold task to that of the anthropologist engaged in reconstructing an early type of human. The first of the three historiographical procedures resembled the anthropologist's assembling of the scattered bones of the primeval human; the second, stringing the bones together to form a skeleton. The third step (he asserted) is often omitted by scholars; namely, the breathing of the breath of life into the dry bones of history."

- Loren C. MacKinney. Speculum 26, no. 1 (1951): 166–70.