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 212
... writing . In order to draw attention to the straitjacket of Western literary and philosophi- cal expectations , Derrida deliberately upset the conventions of writing with his unusual typography , constant flow of neolo- gisms , and ...
... writing . In order to draw attention to the straitjacket of Western literary and philosophi- cal expectations , Derrida deliberately upset the conventions of writing with his unusual typography , constant flow of neolo- gisms , and ...
Page 233
... writing closer to modern music and certain modern novels . 53 In the most extreme form of the postmodernist critique of narrative , special scorn is reserved for those who write for an " ordinary educated public , " since they turn the ...
... writing closer to modern music and certain modern novels . 53 In the most extreme form of the postmodernist critique of narrative , special scorn is reserved for those who write for an " ordinary educated public , " since they turn the ...
Page 261
... writing of any worth . Psychological Dynamics of Knowing In exploring how memory affects the writing of history , we have drawn attention to the psychological need for compre- hending experience which calls for accuracy , as well as the ...
... writing of any worth . Psychological Dynamics of Knowing In exploring how memory affects the writing of history , we have drawn attention to the psychological need for compre- hending experience which calls for accuracy , as well as the ...
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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