From Irving Bartlett’s episode on Booknotes:

“… I started out as pre-ministerial student. Then I was gone for four years during World War II, and I came back transformed. I realized that being a preacher meant being in the answer-giving business, and I seemed to be pointed more toward the question-asking business. Historians are people who ask questions of the past, and I've been doing that ever since. I suppose there's a connection, though. I look on history as a kind of revelation. That's where we [can look to] help find the meaning of life, lessons about the way we should live and so forth.”