Telling the Truth about History

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W. W. Norton & Company, 1994 - History - 322 pages
We 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.

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Contents

Introduction
3
Intellectual Absolutisms
13
The Heroic Model of Science
15
Scientific History and the Idea of Modernity
52
History Makes a Nation
91
Absolutisms Dethroned
127
Competing Histories of America
129
Discovering the Clay Feet of Science
160
Postmodernism and the Crisis of Modernity
198
A New Republic of Learning
239
Truth and Objectivity
241
The Future of History
271
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About the author (1994)

Joyce Oldham Appleby was born in Omaha, Nebraska on April 9, 1929. She graduated from Stanford University in 1950. She worked for the Restaurant Reporter, a trade magazine based in Beverly Hills, and later as a stringer for The Star-News, a local South Pasadena newspaper. She received a Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University. She taught at San Diego State University and at the University of California, Los Angeles. She retired from there in 2001. She wrote several books during her lifetime including Economic Thought and Ideology in 17th Century England, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, and Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination. She died from complications of pneumonia on December 23, 2016 at the age of 87. Lynn Hunt is Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA, former president of the American Historical Association, and author of numerous works, including Inventing Human Rights and Telling the Truth about History. She lives in Los Angeles.

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