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

391-400 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]

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

391) Films rarely give audiences a sense of the challenges in historical interpretation. They address subjects authoritatively, suggesting that the investigation works with an orderly universe of evidence. They fail to show that a filmmaker must give shape and meaning to the sources. In short, films rarely point out that facts do not speak for themselves and that the filmmaker must speak for them. (Robert Brent Toplin, "Filmmaker" 1216-17) [SoundBite #391]

392) Interpretation . . . the life-blood of history. . . . Our examination of the relation of the historian to the facts of history finds us, therefore, in an apparently precarious situation, navigating delicately between the Scylla of an untenable theory of history as an objective compilation of facts, of the unqualified primacy of fact over interpretation, and the Charbydis of an equally untenable theory of history as the subjective product of the mind of the historian who establishes the facts of history and masters them through the process of interpretation, between a view of history having the center of gravity in the past and a view of having the center of gravity in the present. (Edward Hallett Carr 22-23) [SoundBite #392]

393) The idea that nations control the memory of their citizens pushes to the fore the question of which persons are in charge of the nation. They may be virtuous leaders, cultural elites, locally powerful minorities, pluralistic coalitions, triumphant interest groups, or the winning competitors in the latest electoral donnybrook. Whichever they are, they are manifestly not the whole people. (Joyce Appleby et. al.155) [SoundBite #393]

394) Knowledge is a form of power. True, force is the most direct form of power, and government has a monopoly of that (as Max Weber once pointed out). (Howard Zinn 6) [SoundBite #394]

395) Memory is more likely to be activated by contestation, and amnesia is more likely to be induced by the desire for reconciliation. (Michael Kammen, Mystic 13) [SoundBite #395]

396) Halbwachs made a sharp distinction between collective memory, which was a social construct, and written history, which he considered -- in a somewhat old-fashioned positivist way -- to be objective. (Peter Burke 98) [SoundBite #396]

397) Nationality is not a natural consequence or outgrowth of common culture of long antiquity; nations are not so much discovered or awakened, as they are created or invented by the labors of intellectuals. (Eley and Suny 23) [SoundBite #397]

398) The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. (Milan Kundera, qtd. by Schlesinger 52) [SoundBite #398]

399) The main role of history, then, is to provide enabling knowledge and frame of reference for these important matters so that present behaviour is coloured and shaped by assumptions which are realistic because they are rooted in a past which actually happened, not tendentious travesties or fictions in fancy dress. (P. J. Rogers 39) [SoundBite #399]

400) We must not pretend that, unlike all previous generations, we write true history. (James W. Loewen 286) [SoundBite #1314]