Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.
291-300 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]
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291) What I find crucial here is that film is imagined as an instrument with the power to "suture" viewers into pasts they have not lead; the cinema offers spectators with diverse backgrounds and ancestries a shared archive of experience -- what Halbwachs would call a "collective framework." It therefore authorizes and enables individuals to inhabit subjectivities they might themselves have lived and to which they have no "natural" connection. The cinema as an institution, then, might be imagined as a space -- a heterotopia -- in which individuals experience a bodily mimetic encounter with a collective past that they never actually led. (Alison Landsberg, "Prosthetic" 22) [SoundBite #291]
292) Here's exactly what we do: we shake up the system. We don't let what happened to us happen to the children of today -- we don't let what happened to us happen to our children. History is not only taught in the classroom but in the home. Maybe more importantly too. I'd rather listen to my father talk about history than any high school teacher. Legend, myth, tales, cultural significance is passed down from generation to generation -- sure there are some differences, but the overlying cultural conglomerant is there. We are part of the problem and need to be more of the solution. (Douglas McKerns, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #292]
293) This is what may be called the common-sense view of history. History consists of a corpus of ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish on the fishmonger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him. (Edward Hallett Carr 3) [SoundBite #293]
294) A radical history, then, would expose the limitations of governmental reform, the connections of government to wealth and prestige, the tendencies of governments toward war and xenophobia, the play of money and power behind the presumed neutrality of law. It would illustrate the role of government in maintaining things as they are, whether by force, or deception, or by a skilled combination of both -- whether by deliberate plan or by the concatenations of thousands of individuals playing roles according to the expectations around them. (Howard Zinn 44) [SoundBite #294]
295) Every civilization has skeletons in its closets. Honest history calls for the unexpurgated record. (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. 93) [SoundBite #295]
296) Historians tend to use written works of history to critique visual history as if that written history were itself something solid and unproblematic. (Robert Rosenstone 49) [SoundBite #296]
297) The chronicles of American history are strewn with myths, legends, fables, folklore, misinformation, and misconceptions. Some of the myth-making is inadvertent, but much of it is deliberate. Patriotism and filiopietism have set many a tall-tale in motion, but so have political partisanship and ideological zeal. (Paul F. Boller, "Preface") [SoundBite #297]
298) It is the mark of civilised man that he seeks to understand his traditions, and to criticise them, not to swallow them whole. (M. I. Finley, qtd. by Marwick 328) [SoundBite #298]
299) History hinges upon memory: the necessarily selective, collective remembrance that suits a society. (Michael Kammen, Mystic 688) [SoundBite #299]
300) The National Symbolic thus seeks to produce a fantasy of national integration, although the content of this fantasy is a matter of cultural debate and historical transformation. (Lauren Berlant 22) [SoundBite #300]
