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 63
... story in a very short space . So we want to emphasize as strongly as possible that the story only seems to be so purposeful from our perspective of hind- sight . Along the way , the direction was far from obvious to contemporaries ( and ...
... story in a very short space . So we want to emphasize as strongly as possible that the story only seems to be so purposeful from our perspective of hind- sight . Along the way , the direction was far from obvious to contemporaries ( and ...
Page 88
... story with the aim of understanding the patterns of devel- opment . Even though most individual historians no longer aimed to tell the whole universal story themselves in the manner of Hegel or Marx , history as a discipline depended on ...
... story with the aim of understanding the patterns of devel- opment . Even though most individual historians no longer aimed to tell the whole universal story themselves in the manner of Hegel or Marx , history as a discipline depended on ...
Page 263
... story emerges . Indeed , the very idea of an event or development depends upon already having such concepts to describe the passage of time . Western histories are embedded in a matrix of cultural properties like those of progressive ...
... story emerges . Indeed , the very idea of an event or development depends upon already having such concepts to describe the passage of time . Western histories are embedded in a matrix of cultural properties like those of progressive ...
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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