It is the responsibility of all intellectuals to defend and extend the critical spirit, and the special responsibility of historians to bring that spirit to the study of the past–to the record of humanity’s struggle to live decently and to become human. The specialist on medieval France cannot readily offer us direct lessons for our own political engagement although, like Marc Bloch, he may be wholly engaged himself, and it would be insolent to demand that he try. But he must tell us, as best he can, how particular human beings adjusted and did not adjust to momentous changes, made and failed to make better lives for themselves and their children, honored and dishonored their God and their community. He must present some chapter of the infinite grandeur of the human spirit–a grandeur no less for the inescapable frailty and evil that must forever go into the making of everything human.
Eugene Genovese, “On Being a Socialist and a Historian,” in In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History, 12.