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

371-380 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]

<  351-360  361-370  371-380  381-390  391-400  >

371) We [historians] are accustomed to keeping our social commitment extracurricular and our scholarly work safely neutral. (Howard Zinn 5) [SoundBite #371]

372) More people today get their history in movie theaters, from broadcast and cable television, and on prerecorded videocassette tapes than from reading print. During the nineteenth century, historical narratives by William H. Prescott, George Bancroft, and Thomas Carlyle were widely read. Today, history is more likely to be interpreted by Roland Jaffe, Bernardo Bertolucci, or Oliver Stone. Carl Sandburg is said to have remarked that Hollywood was a more effective educational institution than Harvard. (Donald F. Stevens 4) [SoundBite #372]

373) The crisis in historical thinking is certainly real. The dislocations of the past two centuries, the propaganda apparatuses of totalitarian powers, disillusionment with the paradigms of the Enlightenment, and popular culture itself have all served to make the search for a precious and communicable past one of the most pressing problems of our time. (George Lipsitz 36) [SoundBite #373]

374) The passion for tidiness, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has written, "is the historian's occupational disease." (Henry Steele Commager 86) [SoundBite #228]

375) If collective memory (usually a code phrase for what is remembered by the dominant civic culture) and popular memory (usually referring to ordinary folks) are both abstractions that have to be handled with care, what (if anything) can we assert with assurance? --That public interest in the past pulses; it comes and goes. --That we have highly selective memories of what we have been taught about the past. --That the past may be mobilized to serve partisan purposes. --That the past is commercialized for the sake of tourism and related enterprises. --That invocations of the past (as tradition) may occur as a means of resisting change or of achieving innovations. --That history is an essential ingredient in defining national, group, and personal identity. --That the past and its sustaining evidence may give pleasure for purely aesthetic and non-utilitarian reasons. (Michael Kammen, Mystic 10) [SoundBite #375]

376) On those relatively rare occasions when a contemporary filmmaker takes us on a journey into the nation’s past, the implicit purpose almost always involves a searing indictment of some enormous American misdeed. (Michael Medved 225) [SoundBite #374]

377) To put it crudely, however different its members may be in terms of class, gender or race, a national culture seeks to unify them into one cultural identity, to represent them all as belonging to the same great national family. (Stuart Hall 296) [SoundBite #377]

378) It is the uneasiness with the fictional aspect of dramatic historical films that has led many theorists and historians to argue from a “presentist” position. For these writers, including the influential historian Pierre Sorlin, historical films can provide historical knowledge only about the period in which they were made. The past in historical films becomes an allegory of the present; the milieu in which the film was produced stamps every frame. (Robert Burgoyne 10) [SoundBite #1372]

379) History, like literature, speaks directly to curiosity about human experience, but it takes concrete details to open the door into an imaginative recreation of the past. (Joyce Appleby et. al. 152) [SoundBite #379]

380) Films have a way of transporting you into someone else's body, experience, and thoughts. Historical films, in particular, are able to recreate events that have shaped our society and contribute to our mentality and ideals. With that, movies "based on true story" not only entrance the audience because of their entertainment value but because of their closeness to our lives. These films have influence over a widespread population, and they have become not only entertainment sources but educational resources. They have the power to impact thought, drive, and motivate as we as a culture move forward and learn from past mistakes. (Jena Viviano, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #2526]