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 28
... nature occurs only after careful and replicable investigations performed by a dis- tinctive method of experimentation that requires both evidence and theories that seek to find patterns , or what are called laws , at work in nature ...
... nature occurs only after careful and replicable investigations performed by a dis- tinctive method of experimentation that requires both evidence and theories that seek to find patterns , or what are called laws , at work in nature ...
Page 29
... nature and human knowledge of it . After all , the law of universal gravitation works in every lan- guage and every cultural setting . Bodies in free fall accelerate in measurable units proportional to the time they have traveled . The ...
... nature and human knowledge of it . After all , the law of universal gravitation works in every lan- guage and every cultural setting . Bodies in free fall accelerate in measurable units proportional to the time they have traveled . The ...
Page 187
... Nature with all the attributes of transcen- dence that made eighteenth - century scientific truth and the ob- jective posture needed to search for it possible . In the twentieth century , neither God nor Nature has been allowed as an ...
... Nature with all the attributes of transcen- dence that made eighteenth - century scientific truth and the ob- jective posture needed to search for it possible . In the twentieth century , neither God nor Nature has been allowed as an ...
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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