Question

according to louis gottschalk verisimilitude is the goal of historian. what did he mean by that

Answer 1

Answer:

Louis Gottschalk

Louis GottschalkPresident of the Association, 1953

Presidential address read at the annual dinner of the American Historical Association in Chicago, December 29, 1953. American Historical Review 59, no. 2 (January 1954): 273-86.

A Professor of History in a Quandary

A professional sense of duty impels me to confess that what I am about to say is to a certain extent unhistorical. It is in fact largely autobiographical. It suffers therefore, for one thing, from the egocentrism and the lapses of memory characteristic of autobiography. Besides, for the sake of clarity, I have knowingly exercised a certain amount of license with some well-remembered but complex episodes.

I shall couch my relatively autobiographical remarks in the third person. For a speaker who is afraid to appear immodest, the third person seems an appropriate, and perhaps pardonable, saving device. Moreover, a too personal document might well fail to have any application to the more general problems of our profession, and I wish, in talking about myself, merely to describe, with as much detachment as I can muster, that member of our Association whose not unrepresentative professional quandary and its resolution are best known to me. Almost every other professor of history in a graduate school has encountered a similar quandary and some of them no doubt have resolved it with equal satisfaction. The very facts that my problem was not unique and that my answer to it arose naturally from the existing pattern of graduate instruction in history have induced me to believe that you might, on this occasion, wish me to expound my problem and my answer to it.