Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.
351-360 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]
< 351-360 361-370 371-380 381-390 391-400 >
351) Halbwachs argued that memories are constructed by social groups. Individuals remember, in the literal, physical sense. However, it is social groups which determine what is "memorable" and also how it will be remembered. Individuals identify with public events of importance to their group. They "remember" a good deal that they have not experienced directly. (Peter Burke 98) [SoundBite #351]
352) The goal of the antiquarian is the dead past; the goal of the historian is the living present. Droysen has put this true conception into the statement, "History is the 'Know Thyself' of humanity -- the self-consciousness of mankind." (Fredrick Jackson Turner 180) [SoundBite #352]
353) We have no collective memory, none. If it happened more than six hours ago it is gone…. What this says to me is that we just don’t know how to think about the past—and so we try not to…. There is neither memory nor history nor whole people nor even any sense of time. (Meg Greenfield, qtd.in Kammen, Mystic 9) [SoundBite #353]
354) It has long been a defense offered by historical novelists that their fiction is "more true" than what historians do; would that it were so. (Kenneth M. Cameron 239) [SoundBite #354]
355) Written history is, of course, not devoid of emotion, but usually it points to emotion rather than inviting us to experience it. A historian has to be a very good writer to make us feel emotion while the poorest of filmmakers can easily touch our feelings. Film thus raises the following issues: to what extent do we wish emotion to become a historical category? Part of historical understanding? Does history gain something by being empathic? Does film, in short, add to our understanding of the past by making us feel immediately and deeply about particular historical people, events, and situations? (Robert Rosenstone 59) [SoundBite #355]
356) Thus the neoconservatives are not so much against the way history is taught and written, as they are against the complex realities of American history itself. Their desire to elevate a few heroes from the past above their contemporaries, to suppress difference and disagreement, to accept uncritically the past and present as "givens" independent of human agency, rejects the complicated and plural history that has actually happened in favor a mythical construct invented to impose cultural unity and obedience to the present government. Even worse, they profess to "save" historical inquiry by returning it to an uncritical glorification of the past and present, to an institutionalized cheerleading for the victors of the past, no matter how villainous or immoral they may have been. They laud history while fearing historical inquiry, because that inquiry might lead to a critical reappropriation of the past by aggrieved groups. One might call this history a kind of ancestor worship, but its bias toward a certain kind of experience -- white male upper-class experience -- means that most of us are being called upon to worship not our own, but someone else's ancestors. (George Lipsitz 27) [SoundBite #356]
357) We cannot and should not accept another's opinions as our own. Children need a basic moral education and to learn to question authority when these morals are broken. (Wendy Kuhn, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #357]
358) Non-WASPs were the invisible men (and women) in the American past. (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. 53) [SoundBite #358]
359) A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life. A nation's existence is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite, just as an individual's existence is a perpetual affirmation of life. (Ernest Renan 19) [SoundBite #359]
360) Mark Lytle characterized his own textbook as "a McDonald's version of history--if it has any flavor, people won't buy it." (James W. Loewen 277) [SoundBite #1309]
