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

191-200 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]

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191) History is unceasingly controversial because it provides so much of the substance for the way a society defines itself and considers what it wants to be. (Gary Nash et. al. 7) [SoundBite #191]

192) Film, in effect, appears to invoke the emotional certitude we associate with memory. Like memory, film is associated with the body; it engages the viewer at the somatic level, immersing the spectator in experiences and impressions that, like memories, seem to be "burned in." (Robert Burgoyne,) [SoundBite #200]

193) History is necessary, not only to make life agreeable, but also to endow it with moral significance. (Luigi Guicciardini, c. 1500 A.D.) [SoundBite #193]

194) Commemorative activities almost always stress the desirability of maintaining social order and existing institutions, the need to avoid disorder or dramatic changes, and the dominance of citizen rights. (John Bodnar 19) [SoundBite #194]

195) In a postliterate world, it is possible that visual culture will once again change the nature of our relationship to the past. This does not mean giving up on attempts at truth, but somehow recognizing that there may be more than one sort of historical truth, or that the truths conveyed in the visual media may be different from, but not necessarily in conflict with, truths conveyed in words. (Robert Rosenstone 43) [SoundBite #195]

196) History free of all values cannot be written. Indeed, it is a concept almost impossible to understand, for men will scarcely take the trouble to inquire laboriously into something which they set no value on. (W. H. B. Court, qtd. by Marwick 327) [SoundBite #196]

197) History is the life of memory. (Cicero) [SoundBite #197]

198) Making history means form-giving and meaning-giving. . . . As Carl Becker said: "Left to themselves, the facts do not speak . . . for all practical purposes there is no fact till someone affirms it. . . . Since history is . . . an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events its form and substance are inseparable." (Gerda Lerner 107) [SoundBite #198]

199) The processes of nature can therefore be properly described as sequences of mere events, but those of history cannot. They are not processes of mere events but processes of actions, which have an inner side, consisting of processes of thought. All history is the history of thought. . . . The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind. . . . The historian not only re-enacts past thought, but he re-enacts it in the context of his own knowledge and therefore, in re-enacting it, criticizes it, forms his own judgment of its value, corrects whatever errors he can discern in it. (R. G. Collingwood 215) [SoundBite #199]

200) From Indian wars to slavery to Vietnam, textbook authors not only sidestep putting questions of right and wrong to our past actions but even avoid acknowledging that Americans of the time did so. (James W. Loewen 175) [SoundBite #1279]