Parenting & Family Quote by Samuel E. Morison

Morison is doing two things at once: admitting the obvious limitation of his craft while policing the boundaries of what counts as legitimate interpretation. “Any child knows” is a rhetorical shove, a way to present a contested claim as common sense and to pre-empt dissent as either naive or willfully obtuse. History, he concedes, is a “reduced representation” - a model, not a mirror. The move that follows is the tell: reduction is inevitable, but distortion is a moral failing, and the historian’s job is to swear fealty to “true” representation.

The loaded phrase is “queer lenses.” In Morison’s mid-20th-century idiom, “queer” signals not identity politics in the contemporary sense but a broader suspicion of the odd, the slanted, the ideologically “colored.” Still, the line reveals a fear that interpretation can become advocacy, that a historian’s angle can metastasize into an agenda. He’s drawing a bright line between selection (necessary) and refraction (suspect), even though the subtext of modern historiography is that the line is never bright. Every archive is already curated; every narrative has a vantage point; every “reduction” is a choice about what to center and what to drop.

Context matters: Morison was a patrician American historian, famous for narrative clarity and for writing in service of civic memory (and sometimes national self-regard). The quote reads like a defensive brief for a traditional, empiricist authority at a moment when new methods - social history, Marxist analysis, later feminist and postcolonial critiques - threatened to make “truth” plural and power visible. Its intent is reassuring, but its subtext is control: history should be simplified, yes, but only in ways that keep the historian’s preferred normal in frame.