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 63
... idea of the modern . Arguably , modernity first took shape in late - sev- enteenth - century England where the institutions of monarchy and church were irrevocably weakened . Modernity and the origins of democracy in the West are thus ...
... idea of the modern . Arguably , modernity first took shape in late - sev- enteenth - century England where the institutions of monarchy and church were irrevocably weakened . Modernity and the origins of democracy in the West are thus ...
Page 77
... idea of a historian transcending his or her prejudices to write a scientific history of the march toward modernity depended as a political project on the Enlighten- ment sense of the modern and of progress . Once established , however ...
... idea of a historian transcending his or her prejudices to write a scientific history of the march toward modernity depended as a political project on the Enlighten- ment sense of the modern and of progress . Once established , however ...
Page 205
... idea of time itself . Appropriately Delphic , one postmodernist critic called attention to the coming time when " the tellable time of realism and its consensus become the untellable time of postmodern writing . " This entails nothing ...
... idea of time itself . Appropriately Delphic , one postmodernist critic called attention to the coming time when " the tellable time of realism and its consensus become the untellable time of postmodern writing . " This entails nothing ...
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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