Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.
111-120 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]
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111) More easily than the written word, the motion picture seems to let us stare through a window directly at past events, to experience people and places as if we were there. The huge images on the screen and wraparound sounds tend to overwhelm us, swamp our senses and destroy attempts to remain aloof, distanced, or critical. In the movie theater we are, for a time, prisoners of history. (Robert Rosenstone 27) [SoundBite #111]
112) If history is, as the post-structuralists declare, composed of socially constructed narratives, told from particular perspectives to audiences that endlessly refashion them in changing contexts, then what remains for the historian? (Abrash and Walkowitz 203) [SoundBite #112]
113) The quickest and surest way of finding the present in the past, but hardly the soundest, is to put it in there first. (C. H. McIlwain, qtd. by Marwick 326) [SoundBite #113]
114) One of the most visible manifestations of this changing narrative of nation, a change that is evident throughout the spectrum of contemporary life, can be found in the resurgence of films that take the American past as their subject. . . . . the national narrative is currently being reshaped by stories that explore the meaning of nation "from below". . . . a pervasive and growing tendency in contemporary American culture: the desire to remake . . . the "dominant fiction," the ideological reality or "image of social consensus" within which members of a society are asked to identify themselves. (Robert Burgoyne, Film 1) [SoundBite #114]
115) If all I know is what I'm told, when can I learn to tell myself? If believing is seeing, which way do I look? History is quite intriguing, given perception is reality. (Peter Weisman, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #115]
116) Cinematic historians have become powerful storytellers. They are competing effectively with the schoolteacher, the college professor, and the history book author. (Robert Brent Toplin, History ix) [SoundBite #116]
117) Conceptual maps are systems of representations. (Stuart Hall) [SoundBite #117]
118) At this point, I haven't read all of Loewen's book [Lies My Teacher Told Me], but it strikes a chord in my thoughts about high school English textbooks as well. Starting in the 90s (it may even go back before that) English textbooks have morphed from texts that introduce literature and analysis into feel-good non-offensive anthologies. They've cut out Chaucer's jokes about dirty breeches, they've taken Sir Gawain's sexual temptations away. Dickens is entirely missing, Ben Franklin, it would appear only wrote a kind of moral checklist (forget about the debauchery that inspired it). The list goes on and on, and you would think that the editors would use this void to have more women and African American or AfroBritish writers. Not really, they've filled the books with fluffy little "connections" about real people, you guessed it, overcoming difficult situations (a kind of Helen Keller syndrome?). Now, I respect those people who overcome difficult things, but these "connections" have little to do with reading literature, literary analysis, or composition. One of the most bizarre couplings in the Scott Foresman British Literature text coupled the bubble boy with John Donne's Sonnets. (Edward Tabor, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #2960]
119) We have got to have the ugly facts in order to protect us from the official view of reality. (Bill Moyers, qtd. in Loewen, Lies My 214) [SoundBite #120]
120) Whatever the causes, the results of heroification are potentially crippling to students. . . . [It] keeps students in intellectual immaturity. It perpetuates what might be called a Disney version of history. . . . Our children end up without realistic role models to inspire them. Students also develop no understanding of causality in history. (James W. Loewen 35) [SoundBite #1270]
