Time & Perspective Quote by Samuel E. Morison

Morison is stripping the historian of the comforting disguise of neutral “recorder” and revealing a maker with a workshop full of tools - and biases. The language is deliberately material: “gold,” “dross,” “metal,” “design.” History here isn’t a window but a foundry. Facts don’t arrive pre-labeled as meaningful; they’re smelted, sorted, and shaped by someone’s “judgment and set of values,” sometimes outsourced “through his assistants,” a sly nod to the institutional machinery behind supposedly singular authorship.

The intent is bracingly professional: a reminder that significance is not discovered, it’s assigned. Morison isn’t merely warning about distortion; he’s arguing that selection is the job. A historian who claims to include “everything” is either lying or producing unreadable sludge. The subtext is more uncomfortable: if significance is assigned, then power follows the assigner. What counts as “gold” tracks the historian’s class position, nationalism, moral priorities, and the era’s common sense. The archive may be vast, but the narrative is a designed object.

Context matters with Morison. As a celebrated American historian writing in a century of nation-building histories (and as someone often criticized for a patrician, Eurocentric frame), he’s also half-confessing. He knows that histories don’t just report the past; they manufacture civic memory. His phrasing makes that manufacturing sound almost artisanal - “design” suggests craft, even elegance - while quietly admitting the ethical hazard: once you decide what’s “significant,” you decide who gets to be real.