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

341-350 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]

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341) I hope that every good historian is, in at least some of the things he or she does, "popular." History is not an esoteric subject, the preserve of scholarly mandarins. (Bernard Bailyn 69) [SoundBite #341]

342) Once there was a single narrative of national history that most Americans accepted as part of their heritage. Now there is an increasing emphasis on the diversity of ethnic, racial, and gender experience and a deep skepticism about whether the narrative of America's achievements comprises anything more than a self-congratulatory story masking the power of elites. (Joyce Appleby et. al. 1) [SoundBite #342]

343) The essential problem for the intellectual is . . . ascertaining the possibility of constituting a new politics of truth. The problem is not changing people's consciousnesses -- or what's in their heads -- but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth. It's not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power . . . but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time. (Michel Foucault 133) [SoundBite #343]

344) As Eric Hobsbawm has noted, "The mere setting up of a state is not sufficient in itself to create a nation." Nationalism also depends on the mobilization of masses of people and the imaginative process, to use Benedict Anderson's insight, of uniting disparate communities into a "deep horizontal comradeship," irrespective of how much the nation is divided by "actual inequality and exploitation." (Cecilia Elizabeth O' Leary 4) [SoundBite #344]

345) The relation of man to his environment is the relation of the historian to his theme. The historian is neither the humble slave, nor the tyrannical master of his facts. The relation between the historian and his facts is one of equality, of give-and-take. As any working historian knows, if he stops to reflect what he is doing as he thinks and writes, the historian is engaged on a continuous process of moulding his facts to his interpretation and his interpretation to his facts. It is impossible to assign primacy to one over the other. (Edward Hallett Carr 24) [SoundBite #345]

346) Using history is much like reviewing past tests for an upcoming exam. You look at the old exams to see what the thought processes are and how they turned out. History is like an outline for future events; you get the big areas covered, but the details can never be fully accounted for. (James Clewley, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #346]

347) Postmodernism is essentially an extension and elaboration of the old idea that we have no way of seeing or thinking or desiring that we have not acquired from the surrounding culture. We can experience or reflect on the world -- or on ourselves, for that matter -- only through one or another culturally derived form of experiencing or reflecting. (David Harlan xx) [SoundBite #205]

348) History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today. (Henry Ford) [SoundBite #348]

349) The dark visions that Hollywood offers of our present and our past not only influence the attitudes of children and adults in this country, but increasingly shape the image of America in the world at large. (Michael Medved 233) [SoundBite #349]

350) When we study history, we glean greater understanding of the people, ideas, events, and other factors that have directly or indirectly influenced our lives. And we are less likely to repeat the mistakes of those who have gone before us. The world did not begin when we were born. We are all characters in a real-life epic drama that began thousands of years ago. But with no understanding of the past, we are like actors shoved out onto the stage of life in the midst of a long-running play that we don’t understand. We are disoriented. We are ignorant of what’s going on, why things are as they are, or where we fit into the script. We have no understanding of the plot, the major characters, or anything that preceded our arrival on stage. Furthermore, what’s the point of the whole production? We are truly clueless without any sense of history and the lessons it can teach. (William Doherty, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #1839]