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 219
... intellectual and cultural his- tory , no doubt reflecting a general trend.34 The emphasis on decoding meaning , rather than inferring causal laws of expla- 33. Clifford Geertz , " Thick Description : Toward an Interpretive Theory of ...
... intellectual and cultural his- tory , no doubt reflecting a general trend.34 The emphasis on decoding meaning , rather than inferring causal laws of expla- 33. Clifford Geertz , " Thick Description : Toward an Interpretive Theory of ...
Page 241
... intellectual absolutism and looked at their consequences for historians . The first , the Enlightenment faith in the heroic model of science , prompted historians to become like scientists and turn themselves into neutral and ...
... intellectual absolutism and looked at their consequences for historians . The first , the Enlightenment faith in the heroic model of science , prompted historians to become like scientists and turn themselves into neutral and ...
Page 305
... intellectual tool for understanding social action . Modern Westerners cannot live without causal language and generalizations about human be- havior because these organize their reality . Without heuristic concepts of such things as the ...
... intellectual tool for understanding social action . Modern Westerners cannot live without causal language and generalizations about human be- havior because these organize their reality . Without heuristic concepts of such things as the ...
Contents
The Heroic Model of Science | 15 |
2 Scientific History and the Idea of Modernity | 52 |
History Makes a Nation | 91 |
Copyright | |
6 other sections not shown
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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