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 35
... Protestant church , and legal toleration for all Protestants . The chorus of protest against absolutism soon included new voices like the philosophe Voltaire , who claimed that England was superior because of the absence there of ...
... Protestant church , and legal toleration for all Protestants . The chorus of protest against absolutism soon included new voices like the philosophe Voltaire , who claimed that England was superior because of the absence there of ...
Page 44
... Protestant version of Enlightenment put Americans on a path that still influences cultural life . In other words , history matters : whatever their background , participants in American culture never entirely escape the colonial Protestant ...
... Protestant version of Enlightenment put Americans on a path that still influences cultural life . In other words , history matters : whatever their background , participants in American culture never entirely escape the colonial Protestant ...
Page 134
... Protestant citizens of the United States were sorely perplexed by their own intolerant responses to the immigrants ' peculiar ways . What became quite evident was that America's religious diversity had been pretty much confined to the ...
... Protestant citizens of the United States were sorely perplexed by their own intolerant responses to the immigrants ' peculiar ways . What became quite evident was that America's religious diversity had been pretty much confined to the ...
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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Telling the Truth about History Joyce Oldham Appleby,Lynn Hunt,Lynn Avery Hunt,Margaret C. Jacob Limited preview - 1994 |
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