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 42
... French Revolution and in response to it . The late - eighteenth - century revolutions suddenly made history and the human sciences in general vitally important . Assessing the meaning of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution ...
... French Revolution and in response to it . The late - eighteenth - century revolutions suddenly made history and the human sciences in general vitally important . Assessing the meaning of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution ...
Page 97
... French Revolution con- verged with new development in American domestic politics . Quite unexpectedly , the proclamation of the French Re- public called forth a new cohort of American radicals , most of them too young to have engaged in ...
... French Revolution con- verged with new development in American domestic politics . Quite unexpectedly , the proclamation of the French Re- public called forth a new cohort of American radicals , most of them too young to have engaged in ...
Page 219
... French history shifted decisively away from political and social history toward intellectual and cultural his- tory , no doubt reflecting a general trend.34 The emphasis on decoding meaning , rather than inferring causal laws of expla ...
... French history shifted decisively away from political and social history toward intellectual and cultural his- tory , no doubt reflecting a general trend.34 The emphasis on decoding meaning , rather than inferring causal laws of expla ...
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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absolute American Annales school argued became believed Christian Cold War colonial contemporary critics cultural cultural war Darwin democracy democratic Derrida discipline E. P. Thompson economic eighteenth century ence Enlightenment Europe experience explained Foucault French Revolution Hegel hermeneutics heroic model heroic science historians history of science human ical idea identity ideology imagination industrial inquiry insisted intellectual interpretation Isaac Newton Jefferson knowledge language laws liberal lives Marxism meaning ment meta-narratives methods Michel Foucault model of science modern moral multicultural narrative national history nature Newton Newtonian nineteenth century objectivity past perspective philosophical political Popper postmodernism postmodernist practice progress Protestant Puritans questions realism reality reform relativism religious scholars scientific scientific model scientists secular sense seventeenth century skepticism social history society story struggle theory tion tradition truth truth-seeking twentieth century understanding United universal value-free values Western white Americans women words writing