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 269
... knowledge , then one believes it because reason compels one ; no list of good consequences can redeem the falseness of a proposition . This being said , it is not amiss to point out the benefits of a shared commitment to objective knowledge ...
... knowledge , then one believes it because reason compels one ; no list of good consequences can redeem the falseness of a proposition . This being said , it is not amiss to point out the benefits of a shared commitment to objective knowledge ...
Page 276
... knowledge . This transformation - accelerated by the end of the Cold War- affects Americans ' understanding of national history , of stan- dards of truth and objectivity , of the practice of history and the human sciences in general ...
... knowledge . This transformation - accelerated by the end of the Cold War- affects Americans ' understanding of national history , of stan- dards of truth and objectivity , of the practice of history and the human sciences in general ...
Page 281
... knowledge possible . Research programs must be established and findings constantly tested . These involve social processes which leave traces to be encoded within the resulting knowledge , necessitating even more decoding of inherited ...
... knowledge possible . Research programs must be established and findings constantly tested . These involve social processes which leave traces to be encoded within the resulting knowledge , necessitating even more decoding of inherited ...
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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