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 122
... Constitution was a dissolvable compact . So successful was the South in using the Constitution to prevent interference that abolitionist leaders publicly burned copies of the Consti- tution to dramatize their commitment to a higher law ...
... Constitution was a dissolvable compact . So successful was the South in using the Constitution to prevent interference that abolitionist leaders publicly burned copies of the Consti- tution to dramatize their commitment to a higher law ...
Page 123
... Constitution became the embodiment of natural law be- cause of its protection of life , liberty , and property . No longer obliged to consider Southern constitutional thinking with its emphasis upon the contractual nature of the union ...
... Constitution became the embodiment of natural law be- cause of its protection of life , liberty , and property . No longer obliged to consider Southern constitutional thinking with its emphasis upon the contractual nature of the union ...
Page 138
... Constitution . Beard revealed , as no one had before , that history could be a mighty weapon of reform . By writing colloquially about the Constitu- tional Convention and the mixed motives of its delegates , he penetrated the sacred ...
... Constitution . Beard revealed , as no one had before , that history could be a mighty weapon of reform . By writing colloquially about the Constitu- tional Convention and the mixed motives of its delegates , he penetrated the sacred ...
Contents
The Heroic Model of Science | 15 |
2 Scientific History and the Idea of Modernity | 52 |
History Makes a Nation | 91 |
Copyright | |
6 other sections not shown
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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