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 10
... critics and caricaturists at both ends of the political spec- trum , offense comes easily . Cultural conflict has been endemic to Western intellectual life since the philosophes , as the leaders of the Enlightenment are called , took on ...
... critics and caricaturists at both ends of the political spec- trum , offense comes easily . Cultural conflict has been endemic to Western intellectual life since the philosophes , as the leaders of the Enlightenment are called , took on ...
Page 233
... critics take to heart the post- modernist notion that history is irrelevant to identity ( a position not shared , by the way , by Foucault , who attributed all identity to historical processes ) . They deny that story or narrative is ...
... critics take to heart the post- modernist notion that history is irrelevant to identity ( a position not shared , by the way , by Foucault , who attributed all identity to historical processes ) . They deny that story or narrative is ...
Page 279
... Critics of contemporary science have also exposed the appalling neglect of women's scientific training and the gender bias of Western science's rhetoric and research agendas . Still other , principally non - Western , critics have ...
... Critics of contemporary science have also exposed the appalling neglect of women's scientific training and the gender bias of Western science's rhetoric and research agendas . Still other , principally non - Western , critics have ...
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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