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

201-210 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]

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201) If we cannot face our history honestly, we cannot learn from the past. . . . Surely we don't want to be people of the lie, complicit with the worst in American history because we cannot stand to acknowledge it. The way we heal is to come face-to-face with the truth, and then we can better deal with it and each other. (James W. Loewen, Lies Across 22) [SoundBite #201]

202) The traditional view of the relation between history and memory is a relatively simple one. The historian's function is to be a "remembrancer," the custodian of the memory of public events which are put down in writing for the benefit of the actors, to give them fame, and also for the benefit of posterity, to learn from their example. (Peter Burke 97) [SoundBite #202]

203) We are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be. (Michel-Rolph Trouillot xix) [SoundBite #203]

204) History, we can confidently assert, is useful in the sense that art and music, poetry and flowers, religion and philosophy are useful. Without it -- as with these -- life would be poorer and meaner; without it we should be denied some of those intellectual and moral experiences which give meaning and richness to life. Surely it is no accident that the study of history has been the solace of many of the noblest minds of every generation. (Henry Steele Commager 73) [SoundBite #204]

205) Rather than an inviolable, scientific "truth" about past events, history is an unstable and provisional construct that is as much the result of the cultural politics of the present in which the particular history is written as it is the product of the raw data about the past which it is based. (Mike Chopra-Gant 63) [SoundBite #1246]

206) American historical film has been a failure at handling multifaceted historical issues -- at engaging in argument. And no wonder; many of the films have been neoromantic moral melodrama, which are the opposite of argument. (Kenneth M. Cameron 236) [SoundBite #206]

207) Memory is, by definition, a term which directs our attention not to the past but to the past-present relation. It is because “the past” has this living active existence in the present that it matters so much politically. (Johnson and Dawson, qtd. in Kammen, Mystic 5) [SoundBite #207]

208) National cultures construct identities by producing meanings about "The nation" with which we can "identify"; these are contained in the stories which are told about it, memories which connect its present with its past, and images which are constructed of it. (Stuart Hall 293) [SoundBite #208]

209) History, despite its wrenching pain / Cannot be outlived, and if faced / With courage, need not be lived again. (Maya Angelou, "On the Pulse of the Morning") [SoundBite #209]

210) Among good teachers, the idea persists that teaching is about transmitting culture. (Lynne V. Cheyney 6) [SoundBite #210]