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 4
... evidence of the government's previous misdeeds in order to fortify the will to reconstitute their nation . Because history and historical evidence are so crucial to a people's sense of identity , the evidence itself often becomes the ...
... evidence of the government's previous misdeeds in order to fortify the will to reconstitute their nation . Because history and historical evidence are so crucial to a people's sense of identity , the evidence itself often becomes the ...
Page 73
... evidence . The seminar rooms and archives where university scholars taught and did research became the laboratories of history ; historians sought their evidence amid the dust of actual documents and other traces left by the past ...
... evidence . The seminar rooms and archives where university scholars taught and did research became the laboratories of history ; historians sought their evidence amid the dust of actual documents and other traces left by the past ...
Page 261
... evidence . The con- temporary example of the bogus scholars who say there was no Holocaust painfully demonstrates ... evidence , for evidence is only evidence in relation to a particular account . ( Think of the detective who notices a ...
... evidence . The con- temporary example of the bogus scholars who say there was no Holocaust painfully demonstrates ... evidence , for evidence is only evidence in relation to a particular account . ( Think of the detective who notices a ...
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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