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 178
... kind . More tolerant Anglicans , like Newton's teachers , were willing to compromise with for- mer Puritans , and as a result they were persecuted by the less tolerant ; even the new science , because associated with the Pu- ritan cause ...
... kind . More tolerant Anglicans , like Newton's teachers , were willing to compromise with for- mer Puritans , and as a result they were persecuted by the less tolerant ; even the new science , because associated with the Pu- ritan cause ...
Page 229
... kind of society in which we would like to live . These are aesthetic or literary choices because they involve ways of organizing a narrative , but history is more than a branch of letters to be judged only in terms of its literary merit ...
... kind of society in which we would like to live . These are aesthetic or literary choices because they involve ways of organizing a narrative , but history is more than a branch of letters to be judged only in terms of its literary merit ...
Page 289
... kind of arm - wrestling approach to poli- tics which has stifled debate and limited public access for those without sufficient clout to push their way into the bargaining arena . Pragmatism , dependent as it is upon exhaustive testing ...
... kind of arm - wrestling approach to poli- tics which has stifled debate and limited public access for those without sufficient clout to push their way into the bargaining arena . Pragmatism , dependent as it is upon exhaustive testing ...
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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