Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.

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1) The reasons [for teaching history in school] are many, but none are more important to a democratic society than this: knowledge of history is the precondition of political intelligence. Without history, a society shares no common memory of where it has been, what its core values are, or what decisions of the past account for present circumstances. Without history, we cannot undertake any sensible inquiry into the political, social, or moral issues in society. And without historical knowledge and inquiry, we cannot achieve the informed, discriminating citizenship essential to effective participation in the democratic processes of governance and the fulfillment for all our citizens of the nation's democratic ideals. (National Standards for United States History 1) [SoundBite #1]

2) Once, not very long ago, history was one of our primary forms of moral reflection. American history and intellectual historians wrote broad-gauged, morally instructive histories -- histories that taught us how to speak in the first-person plural, histories that reminded us of what we, as a people, have always wished to become. . . . American historians no longer write that kind of history, of course. It has come to seem moralistic and elitist -- and worst of all, grossly insensitive to the racial and ethnic diversity of the American past. (David Harlan xv) [SoundBite #2]

3) Roland Barthes has said that when watching certain widescreen films, he felt as if he were standing on "the balcony of history," a statement that captures the impressive power of historical films to represent the past from what seems like an ideal vantage point. (Robert Burgoyne 2) [SoundBite #1365]

4) As we historians become absorbed in our stories, we like to forget that all history, including written history, is a construction, not a reflection. That history (as we practice it) is an ideological and cultural product of the Western World at a particular time in its development. That history is a series of conventions for thinking about the past. That the claims of history for universality are no more than the grandiose claims of any knowledge system. That language itself is only a convention for doing history -- one that privileges certain elements: fact, analysis, linearity. The clear implication: history need not be done on the page. It can be a mode of thinking that utilizes elements other than the written word: sound, vision, feeling, montage. (Robert Rosenstone 11) [SoundBite #4]

5) We seem to forget that history is written by the hands of human historians as opposed to unbiased ghostwriters. History is not one image downloaded from a photographer's hard drive; it is a collage of images with captions, instead. We mustn’t forget that "the historian will always to some extent play the role of story teller--selecting from a fragmented and disordered array of facts from the past, deciding which to foreground and ordering them into a narrative organization that will be meaningful for the contemporary reader" (Chopra-Gant 59). If we do not maintain this awareness while reading history, we may interpret these historical memories as absolute facts, as opposed to one account of the events. By removing the "unbiased” and supreme authority status associated with the historian, we will challenge ourselves to reconsider the validity of historical films. (Hilary Chadwick, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #1236]

6) Ronald Reagan, a man of the movies before he was one of politics, seemed occasionally unable or unwilling to distinguish between the world that is in films from the world that is not. He told audiences of a bomber pilot's decision to go down with his injured comrade rather than bail out. The pilot, Reagan said, was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. In 1983, Reagan told the Israeli prime minister of his horror at seeing the Nazi death camps when he visited them after the war as a member of a military film crew. Neither story was true. The heroic scene in the bomber described by Reagan came entirely from the 1944 picture, Wing and a Prayer, and Reagan never served on a film crew in Germany; his whole military career was spent in Los Angeles, making movies. (Phillip L. Gianos xi) [SoundBite #6]

7) A nation can therefore be defined as a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members. (Anthony D. Smith 14) (hear audio gloss by Edward J. Gallagher) [SoundBite #7]

8) Historical films help to shape the thinking of millions. Often the depictions seen on the screen influence the public's view of historical subjects much more than books. (Robert Brent Toplin, History vi) [SoundBite #8]

9) The historian, by habit, is a passive reporter, studying the combatants of yesterday, while those of today clash outside his window. . . . in a world where children are still not safe from starvation or bombs, should not the historian thrust himself and his writing into history, on behalf of goals in which he deeply believes? Are we historians not humans first, and scholars because of that? (Howard Zinn 1) [SoundBite #9]

10) More than math or science, more even than American literature, courses in American history hold the promise of telling high school students how they and their parents, their communities and their society came to be as they are. (James W. Loewen 207) [SoundBite #1281]