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 27
... became a symbol of unfet- tered truth . During and after the democratic revolutions in Western Europe , their initiators and supporters would cite the progress of British industry and the backwardness of Catholic and southern Europe to ...
... became a symbol of unfet- tered truth . During and after the democratic revolutions in Western Europe , their initiators and supporters would cite the progress of British industry and the backwardness of Catholic and southern Europe to ...
Page 73
... became the laboratories of history ; historians sought their evidence amid the dust of actual documents and other traces left by the past . Through the seminar , invented in the 1830s by a German professor of history , Leopold von Ranke ...
... became the laboratories of history ; historians sought their evidence amid the dust of actual documents and other traces left by the past . Through the seminar , invented in the 1830s by a German professor of history , Leopold von Ranke ...
Page 100
... became a part of American character . Solidarity in this highly mobile society would be fashioned from the outpouring of energy devoted to social betterment . Defeating the establishment's presidential candidate , mobilizing volunteers ...
... became a part of American character . Solidarity in this highly mobile society would be fashioned from the outpouring of energy devoted to social betterment . Defeating the establishment's presidential candidate , mobilizing volunteers ...
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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