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

261-270 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]

<  251-260  261-270  271-280  281-290  291-300  >

261) Textbook authors need not choose sides, either. They could present several interpretations, along with an overview of the historical support for each, and invite students to come to their own conclusions. Such challenges are not the textbook authors’ style, however. They seem compelled to present the "right" answer to all questions, even unresolved controversies. (James W. Loewen 269) [SoundBite #1285]

262) The only way we, as historians, can fulfill our responsibility to the dead is by making sure their works do not get lost in the past -- in other words, by raising them up from the graveyard of dead contexts and helping them take up new lives among the living. The best way to respect the dead is to help them speak to the living. (David Harlan xxxii-xxxiii) [SoundBite #262]

263) Conquerors have often destroyed historical monuments and the preserved record of the past of the conquered; sometimes, they have also destroyed the intellectuals who remember too much. Without history, no nation can enjoy legitimacy or command patriotic allegiance. (Gerda Lerner 108) [SoundBite #263]

264) Not satisfied with merely depicting the past, Hollywood has often attempted to influence history by turning out films consciously designed to change public attitudes toward matters of social or political importance. (Peter Rollins 1) [SoundBite #264]

265) The ideal of history, in the words of Morris Cohen, is "an imaginative reconstruction of the past which is scientific in its determinations and artistic in its formulation." (Herbert J. Muller 29) [SoundBite #265]

266) Every reality has experience and reflection -- never just one. We do both at the same time. History and representation are the same thing. History is happening and being represented at the same time. (Peter Weisman, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #266]

267) There is "historical fiction" and there is something one might call "history as fiction". . . . The literary imagination is boundless -- and should be boundless. History is an imaginative construction, too; but the historical imagination must be bounded, closely bounded. . . . The correspondence to actuality in history, the struggle to describe objectively what actually happened, however dimly we may perceive it, is the essence of history. If it's history, it can be disproved. You can't disprove a novel, but you can disprove history; and that seems to me all the difference in the world. . . . Creativity in science, the physicist Richard Feynman said, is imagination in a straitjacket. So, too, is creativity in history. (Bernard Bailyn 70, 72, 73, 75) [SoundBite #267]

268) History is not a succession of events, it is the links between them. (E. E. Evans-Pritchard, qtd. by Marwick 328) [SoundBite #268]

269) More Americans have learned the story of the South during the years of the Civil War and Reconstruction from Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind than from all the learned volumes of the period. (Beck and Clowers 1:ix) [SoundBite #269]

270) The traditional account of the relation between memory and history [is] memory reflects what actually happened and history reflects memory. (Peter Burke 97) [SoundBite #270]