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 17
... West's liberation from igno- rance . As eighteenth - century polemicists triumphed in the cultural war against the clergy and churches , their secular vision amplified the heroic stature awarded to the great scientists . Ideas of ...
... West's liberation from igno- rance . As eighteenth - century polemicists triumphed in the cultural war against the clergy and churches , their secular vision amplified the heroic stature awarded to the great scientists . Ideas of ...
Page 32
... Western Europe , eighteenth - century Britain witnessed the application of mechanical science to the manufacturing and ... West the compelling progress attributed to science and technology arose in tandem with a distinctive political cul ...
... Western Europe , eighteenth - century Britain witnessed the application of mechanical science to the manufacturing and ... West the compelling progress attributed to science and technology arose in tandem with a distinctive political cul ...
Page 80
... Western Europe . In the east , Marxism not only dominated but excluded all other options , at least on paper , while in the west , Marxism reemerged in the 1930s as an oppositional ideology . In the United States , the impact of Marxism ...
... Western Europe . In the east , Marxism not only dominated but excluded all other options , at least on paper , while in the west , Marxism reemerged in the 1930s as an oppositional ideology . In the United States , the impact of Marxism ...
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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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