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

181-190 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]

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181) Interpretation is dependent on historical and cultural context. (Stuart Hall) [SoundBite #181]

182) Film is the only art form, apart from architecture, that routinely requires financing involving millions of dollars: as Orson Welles noted, a poet needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a filmmaker an army. Film armies -- what Welles called "this terribly expensive paintbox" -- cost money. (Phillip L. Gianos 2) [SoundBite #182]

183) If the audience don’t like a picture, they have a good reason. The public is never wrong. I don’t go for all this thing that when I have a failure, it is because the audience doesn’t have the taste or education, or isn’t sensitive enough. The public pays money. It wants to be entertained. That’s all I know. (Samuel Goldwyn, qtd. in Mintz and Roberts 11) [SoundBite #183]

184) A gifted teacher of history is not only someone who encourages his or her students to develop their own powers of criticism, observation, and analysis. He or she is also someone who can convey the emotional and romantic aspect of history. (William J. Bennett, Children 164) [SoundBite #188]

185) I think that cinematic historians should be applauded for the efforts that they put into creating a visual portrayal of history. I think that the American population today has lost the desire to read its history. I think that the idea of "Hollywoodization" in film is real but how much different is it than what happens in literature. Books are made for entertainment as well. The fact that films get scoffed at because they are made to entertain is ridiculous, because books attempt to do the same thing or they would never sell a thing. Cinematic historians just allow the audience to see a historical event in a different light. (Jessica Roche, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #185]

186) I am urging value-laden historiography. . . . What kind of awareness moves people in humanistic directions, and how can historical writing create such awareness, such movement? I can think of five ways in which history can be useful. . . . 1. We can intensify, expand, sharpen our perception of how bad things are, for the victims of the world. . . . 2. We can expose the pretensions of government to either neutrality or beneficence. . . . 3. We can expose the ideology that pervades our culture -- using "ideology" in Mannheim's sense: rationale for the going order. . . . 4. We can recapture those few moments in the past which show the possibility of a better way of life than that which has dominated the earth thus far. . . . 5. We can show how good social movements can go wrong, how leaders can betray their followers, how rebels can become bureaucrats, how ideals can become frozen and reified. (Howard Zinn 36, 42, 45, 47, 51) [SoundBite #190]

187) [There is] the critical distinction between what happened in the past versus what we say about it. The former is "the past," the latter "history." (James W. Loewen, Lies Across 21) [SoundBite #187]

188) What about all of the good things that have happened? Aren't those events we would like to happen again? And if a filmmaker fudges a little on the actual history, maybe enough people will believe that version and in the future events won't play out in the same manner as they did the first time. (Kelsey Duffy, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #1217]

189) The past has no meaningful existence except as it exists for us, as it is given meaning by us. In piety and justice we try to see it as it was, or as it seemed to the men who lived it, but even this poetic interest is not disinterested; in our contemplation of the drama, we see what is most pertinent for our own hopes and fears. Hence the past keeps changing with the present. Every age has to rewrite its history, re-create the past; in every age a different Christ dies on the Cross, and is resurrected to a different end. . . . Our task is to create a "usable past," for our own living purposes. (Herbert J. Muller 33) [SoundBite #189]

190) Historians view the constant search for new perspectives as the lifeblood of historical understanding. (Eric Foner, xvi) [SoundBite #1363]