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 34
... religious warfare and political up- heaval . But in the final decade of the century , the established pattern of intolerance clashed with a new cultural force . Newly empowered English and exiled French Protestants pitted sci- ence and ...
... religious warfare and political up- heaval . But in the final decade of the century , the established pattern of intolerance clashed with a new cultural force . Newly empowered English and exiled French Protestants pitted sci- ence and ...
Page 35
... religious toleration for all Prot- estants . The Revolution of 1688-89 - sometimes called " Glorious " -gave unprecedented constitutional life to parlia- mentary government in England and ushered in an era of legally protected freedom ...
... religious toleration for all Prot- estants . The Revolution of 1688-89 - sometimes called " Glorious " -gave unprecedented constitutional life to parlia- mentary government in England and ushered in an era of legally protected freedom ...
Page 134
... religious diversity had been pretty much confined to the Protestant strain of Christianity , and within that strain common folkways had ameliorated the friction from divurging patterns of faith and worship . Whether they were Catholic ...
... religious diversity had been pretty much confined to the Protestant strain of Christianity , and within that strain common folkways had ameliorated the friction from divurging patterns of faith and worship . Whether they were Catholic ...
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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