Telling the Truth about HistoryWe have lost our grip on historical truth. Popular films depict subterranean conspiracies that shape historical events and public knowledge of those events. Best-selling narrative histories dissolve the border between fact and fiction, allowing the author's imagination to roam freely. Influential critics dissolve the author herself into one among many sources of meaning, reducing historical knowledge to a series of texts engaged with each other, not with the past. Powerful constituencies call for histories that affirm more than inform. This new book by three of our most accomplished historians engages the various criticisms that have fragmented the authority of historical knowledge. Although acknowledging degrees of legitimacy in the criticisms, the authors launch a pragmatic response that supports the historian, as they put it, in her long climb, notebook computer in tow, up the 300 stairs to the archives in Lyon. Even if historical truth is an ever-receding goal, the effort to approach it, they show, is legitimate, worthy, and governed by agreed-upon rules. And while affirming the claims of women and ethnic minorities to a rightful place in any narrative of American history, the authors insist on the accountability of history. They outline a coherent narrative of the American past that incorporates its multicultural dimension without special pleading. |
From inside the book
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Page 105
... American nationalists used for pasting together the country's component parts . In histories for students , the American Revolution was presented as the next most important event to the birth of Christ ; as Ruth Elson concluded from a ...
... American nationalists used for pasting together the country's component parts . In histories for students , the American Revolution was presented as the next most important event to the birth of Christ ; as Ruth Elson concluded from a ...
Page 112
... American values to cement a fragile political union and , ironically , created an understanding of American nation- alism which impeded historical consciousness . Cruising above this popular and self - congratulatory national history ...
... American values to cement a fragile political union and , ironically , created an understanding of American nation- alism which impeded historical consciousness . Cruising above this popular and self - congratulatory national history ...
Page 299
... American experience in national history , however , proved almost impossible , because they represented such an indigestible element in the tale of American democracy . If in the late twentieth century Americans can accept the less ...
... American experience in national history , however , proved almost impossible , because they represented such an indigestible element in the tale of American democracy . If in the late twentieth century Americans can accept the less ...
Contents
The Heroic Model of Science | 15 |
2 Scientific History and the Idea of Modernity | 52 |
History Makes a Nation | 91 |
Copyright | |
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Other editions - View all
Telling the Truth about History Joyce Oldham Appleby,Lynn Hunt,Lynn Avery Hunt,Margaret C. Jacob Limited preview - 1994 |
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