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 25
... believed in the power of machines the way pilgrims had once believed in relics . They found it hard to believe that anyone would resist their progress . British engineers spread the new techniques from Bohemia to western Pennsylvania ...
... believed in the power of machines the way pilgrims had once believed in relics . They found it hard to believe that anyone would resist their progress . British engineers spread the new techniques from Bohemia to western Pennsylvania ...
Page 168
... believed that science in totalitarian societies could not be rational . The generation of Conant , Butterfield , and Nef viewed sci- ence through lenses that had been focused by Popper and his 11. Karl P. Popper , Realism and the Aim of ...
... believed that science in totalitarian societies could not be rational . The generation of Conant , Butterfield , and Nef viewed sci- ence through lenses that had been focused by Popper and his 11. Karl P. Popper , Realism and the Aim of ...
Page 192
... believed his science could reveal . This limitation constrains science , making it nei- ther very heroic nor grand , but leaving it both rational and powerful . Indeed , unheroic truths even have their philosophi- cal advocates . Since ...
... believed his science could reveal . This limitation constrains science , making it nei- ther very heroic nor grand , but leaving it both rational and powerful . Indeed , unheroic truths even have their philosophi- cal advocates . Since ...
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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