Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.
121-130 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]
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121) One of the jewels in democracy’s crown is an educated citizenry that welcomes new harvests of information, unsettling questions, and fresh visions that illuminate our past as well as our present conditions. (Gary Nash et. al. 277) (hear audio gloss by Stephanie McElroy) [SoundBite #121]
122) Let me translate multiculture-speak for you and put it into more direct language we all can understand: Indians are good. White Europeans are bad. Blacks are good. Asians, we’re not too sure about. Regardless of how they camouflage it, this is the essence of multiculturalism and the kind of psychobabble being disseminated in our institutions of higher learning today. (Rush Limbaugh 69) [SoundBite #122]
123) I wonder if there is a difference between personal memory and society’s memory in terms of active or passive status? One does not think of actively making memories – it is a natural and seemingly passive part of our lives. But how do we view history? Do we actively create it? Or does it have more passive characteristics? Similarly, the amnesiac does not appreciate his or her personal memories until they can no longer be recalled – does society face a similar risk? Will society not appreciate its history (its memories) until they are neglected and can no longer be remembered? What pressure or value does this place upon the telling and sharing of a society’s history? (Kristen Merlo, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #1234]
124) The flux in mainstream culture is obvious to all. But stability, not change, is the chief characteristic of cultural literacy. (E. D. Hirsch, Jr. 29) [SoundBite #124]
125) The historical traumas of the past — slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, the assassination of President Kennedy, the Vietnam War – have now emerged as important catalysts of cultural redefinition, evidenced in the extraordinary degree of contestation and debate circulating around current historical films that deal with these events, and in controversies over recent museum exhibitions and commemorative reenactments. (Robert Burgoyne, Film 120) [SoundBite #125]
126) The historians are the guardians of tradition, the priests of the cult of nationality, the prophets of social reform, the exponents and upholders of national virtue and glory. (Philip Bagby, qtd. by Marwick 326) [SoundBite #126]
127) History is the summarized experience of society, as experience is the condensed history of the individual. Without experience the individual is as lost as a baby without a mother, a learner driver without a qualified passenger, a potholer without a torch. Without history a society scarcely exists. (Harold Perkin 69) [SoundBite #127]
128) Often history is invoked to justify the ruling class. . . . This is top-dog history, designed to show how noble, virtuous, and inevitable existing power arrangements are. Because it vindicates the status quo and the methods by which power is achieved and maintained, it may be called exculpatory history. Other times history is invoked to justify the victims of power, to vindicate those who reject the status quo. . . . This is underdog history, designed to demonstrate what Bertrand Russell called "the superior virtue of the oppressed" by inventing or exaggerating past glories and purposes. It may be called compensatory history. (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. 49) [SoundBite #128]
129) Truth is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. (Michel Foucault 133) [SoundBite #129]
130) What we need, according to the Left, is a history that demythologizes the past, that strips away conventional pieties and ideological pretensions in order to reveal the social, economic and ideological forces that have driven American history and shaped American culture. Instead of history as moral reflection, we get history as cultural unmasking. (David Harlan xix) [SoundBite #130]
