Professor Plumb is outstanding among contemporary historians in fighting this diminished scope of his chosen discipline. It is shown, of course, in the breadth of his historical interests where his editorial work and his essays demonstrate his remarkable historical range. But it emerges more powerfully in the depth of his probing, and the constantly held wide perspective in which he has studied and made his own a portion of English history – the interrelation of political and social order in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries... Again and again J. H. Plumb brings to our conciousness by inference the triumphant victory of humanity in the last centuries, despite all setbacks, over material squalor, disease and brutality of manners; equally insistent is his sense of the tragic shortness of men's lives set beside their aspirations, of their persistent proneness to cruelty, to lethargy or to corruption.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Professor Plumb is outstanding among contemporary historians in fighting this diminished scope of his chosen discipline. It is shown, of course, in the breadth of his historical interests where his editorial work and his essays demonstrate his remarkable historical range. But it emerges more powerfully in the depth of his probing, and the constantly held wide perspective in which he has studied and made his own a portion of English history – the interrelation of political and social order in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries... Again and again J. H. Plumb brings to our conciousness by inference the triumphant victory of humanity in the last centuries, despite all setbacks, over material squalor, disease and brutality of manners; equally insistent is his sense of the tragic shortness of men's lives set beside their aspirations, of their persistent proneness to cruelty, to lethargy or to corruption." in the context of "Angus Wilson, quoted in Neil McKendrick, 'J. H. Plumb: A Valedictory Tribute', in Neil McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb (1974), p. 17" to mean that wisdom is timeless.