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
... eighteenth - century forebears who first gloried in it . True to their age , late - twentieth - century historians of Western science have become skeptical in ways that the true believers of the eighteenth - century Enlightenment and ...
... eighteenth - century forebears who first gloried in it . True to their age , late - twentieth - century historians of Western science have become skeptical in ways that the true believers of the eighteenth - century Enlightenment and ...
Page 37
... eighteenth century , histo- rians initiated a practice now familiar to anyone who has read a history book . They read old documents and chronicles for what they could reveal about the people who wrote them . They be- gan to examine what ...
... eighteenth century , histo- rians initiated a practice now familiar to anyone who has read a history book . They read old documents and chronicles for what they could reveal about the people who wrote them . They be- gan to examine what ...
Page 61
... eighteenth - cen- tury historians began to write a story of improvement and then of progress . In their story of progress , a major reversal oc- curred . Optimism about the prospect of steady amelioration of the human lot in this world ...
... eighteenth - cen- tury historians began to write a story of improvement and then of progress . In their story of progress , a major reversal oc- curred . Optimism about the prospect of steady amelioration of the human lot in this world ...
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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