What is a Historian?

[wpbinzel]

In July 2018, I attended a book talk at George Washington's Mount Vernon by historian Gonzalo M. Quintero Saravia, who wrote a brilliant history of Bernardo de Galvez and New Orleans. In the Q&A that followed, a question was asked that implied a criticism of Andrew Jackson because of his treatment of Native Americans. The response was too quick to capture verbatim, but it was to effect that the role of a historian was to report facts, as best as they could be determined; from there, the analysis from a social history perspective was best left to moral philosophy. He said that the two should not be confused.