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

431-440 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]

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431) We may list six main attributes of ethnic community [one in which people are self-aware that they form a separate collectivity] . . . 1. a collective proper name 2. a myth of common ancestry 3. shared historical memories 4. one or more differentiating elements of common culture 5. an association with a specific "homeland" 6. a sense of solidarity for significant sectors of the population. (Anthony D. Smith 21) [SoundBite #431]

432) Nevertheless [though the historian is inevitably a sort of artist] history must always aim at literal truth. . . . A lover of history loves it straight, without chasers of fancy; he is especially irritated by merely picturesque history, or by such bastardized offspring as the fictionalized biography. This concern for literal truth helps to explain why historians, the lovers of the past, have been more disposed to condemn their predecessors than poets have been. (Herbert J. Muller 31) [SoundBite #432]

433) The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it. . . . The question is how far it is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-creating. (Friedrich Nietzsche, qtd. in Carr 21) [SoundBite #433]

434) The invocation of history is indispensable to nations and groups in the process of making themselves. How else can a people establish the legitimacy of its personality, the continuity of its tradition, the correctness of its course? (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. 48) [SoundBite #434]

435) Documentary films . . . are also mediated by our imaginations and can suffer from falsification through juxtaposition and problems of connecting images with texts. (Donald F. Stevens 7) [SoundBite #435]

436) The history of national memory is hard to separate from the history of patriotism. (Michael Kammen, Mystic 13) [SoundBite #436]

437) Social historians during the past three decades have concentrated upon the experience of America's outsiders -- the poor, the persecuted, and the foreign. Their scholarship has revealed the fragility of community in an economic order which promotes competition for jobs and money and exposes working-class families to the inevitable ups and downs of the business cycle. The structural punishments of capitalism, they argue, have been denied through a presentation of reality which ascribes poverty to character flaws and bad luck. To tell the story of striking miners, Southern sharecroppers, or factory-working mothers, as they have, does more than give voice to the previously inaudible, it exposes the costs of capitalism. (Joyce Appleby et. al. 158) [SoundBite #437]

438) Instead of thinking of national cultures as unified, we should think of them as constituting a "discursive device" which represents difference as unity or identity. They are cross-cut by deep internal divisions and differences, and "unified" only through the exercise of different forms of cultural power. Yet . . . national identities continue to be represented as "unified". . . . "Modern nations are all cultural hybrids." (Stuart Hall 297) [SoundBite #438]

439) Oliver Daddow takes this argument even further, pointing out that not only is the act of writing history a process of constructing a narrative about the past, but very often the documents from which the historians obtain their “facts” are themselves the result of efforts by contemporaneous chroniclers of historical events to provide a coherent narrative account of those events. For now it is enough to note that even the sources of “original” information upon which histories are based are already somewhat removed from the actual events to which they relate. (Mike Chopra-Gant 58) [SoundBite #1251]

440) We are living American history in this moment, and one day we will be able to reflect on these happenings through film. Film gives us the opportunity to understand the history we did not live and, at times, make peace with the history we did. The emotions we feel as we watch what occurred on screen provide a connection and comprehension that one would otherwise not associate with the history. Historical films are a textbook come to life and the emotions of this moment, and those in the movies we have watched have vitality on screen that words alone may not offer. (Katy Watters, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #2533]