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 172
... social . The heroes of science got put up on their pedestals because they were true heroes , smarter and more cre- ative than everyone else . Under the influence of social history , a new generation of so - called Externalist historians ...
... social . The heroes of science got put up on their pedestals because they were true heroes , smarter and more cre- ative than everyone else . Under the influence of social history , a new generation of so - called Externalist historians ...
Page 195
... Social perspectives such as these do not seek to deny the existence of truths hard won by reasoned inquiry and contestation ( even if the struggle appears to be largely private , resembling Newton's dialogue with Descartes ) . Rather ...
... Social perspectives such as these do not seek to deny the existence of truths hard won by reasoned inquiry and contestation ( even if the struggle appears to be largely private , resembling Newton's dialogue with Descartes ) . Rather ...
Page 198
... social and political trans- formations to dethrone many of the long - standing ab- solutisms about the nature of the American nation and the certainty provided by the heroic model of science . Social history challenged American unity by ...
... social and political trans- formations to dethrone many of the long - standing ab- solutisms about the nature of the American nation and the certainty provided by the heroic model of science . Social history challenged American unity by ...
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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