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 85
... economic development were intimately linked ; economic de- velopment was the key process in modernization but economic development could not take place without modernization , which was defined to include a shift from agriculture to ...
... economic development were intimately linked ; economic de- velopment was the key process in modernization but economic development could not take place without modernization , which was defined to include a shift from agriculture to ...
Page 121
... economic system is voluntary is itself an amaz- ing cultural artifact . Americans came to think of their economic responses as natural largely because of the way their history was framed . Already well established in colonial America ...
... economic system is voluntary is itself an amaz- ing cultural artifact . Americans came to think of their economic responses as natural largely because of the way their history was framed . Already well established in colonial America ...
Page 222
... economic , social , or demographic processes that had previously occupied Annales historians . For the new generation of the Annales school , mentalités or culture could no longer be characterized as part of the " third level " of ...
... economic , social , or demographic processes that had previously occupied Annales historians . For the new generation of the Annales school , mentalités or culture could no longer be characterized as part of the " third level " of ...
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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