Success Quote by James Harvey Robinson

A historian declaring, "Our goal, simply stated, is to be the best" sounds like a boardroom slogan dropped into a seminar. That mismatch is the point. Robinson, a leading voice in the early 20th-century "New History" movement, was arguing that history shouldn’t be a cabinet of dead facts but a living tool for understanding society. The line’s clipped confidence performs modernity: it refuses the fussy qualifications that usually protect scholars from sounding like salesmen. He’s staking a claim that the historian’s work can compete with the era’s rising professional classes, laboratories, and efficiency-minded institutions on their own terms.

The intent is institutional as much as intellectual. "Our goal" turns scholarship into a team sport, implying standards, training, and shared discipline rather than lone-genius antiquarianism. "Simply stated" signals impatience with academic self-mystification; it’s a jab at the kind of erudition that mistakes complexity for rigor. Underneath, though, the phrase smuggles in a thorny question: best at what? Best at accuracy, narrative power, public influence, moral clarity, civic usefulness? Robinson leaves that ambiguous, which lets the statement function as a rallying cry across competing visions of what history should do in a rapidly changing America.

Context matters: this is the Progressive Era, when expertise was becoming a form of authority and universities were being reorganized into modern research engines. Robinson’s bravado isn’t empty; it’s protective. If historians can’t justify their craft as excellence with consequences, they risk becoming ornamental, a humanities wing in a world increasingly run by metrics, management, and "practical" knowledge.