Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.
441-450 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]
< 401-410 411-420 421-430 431-440 441-450 >
441) The historian establishes verisimilitude rather than objective truth. (Louis Gottschalk, qtd. in Burns 17) [SoundBite #441]
442) There is no other country in the world where there is such a large gap between the sophisticated understanding of some professional historians and the basic education given by teachers. (Marc Ferro 225) [SoundBite #442]
443) All history is "contemporary history," declared Croce, meaning that history consists essentially in seeing the past through the eyes of the present and in light of its problems, and that the main work of the historian is not to record, but to evaluate; for if he does not evaluate, how can he know what is worth recording? (Edward Hallett Carr 15) [SoundBite #443]
444) Facts are essential components of the basic skills that a child entering a culture must have. (E. D. Hirsch, Jr. 28) [SoundBite #444]
445) Let our children try to imagine the arrival of Columbus from the viewpoint of those who met him as well as those who sent him. (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. 15) [SoundBite #445]
446) Nations [become] idealized communities, which at one and the same time ["recover"] the history they [need] to bind diverse elements into a single whole, and yet [conceal] the actual inequalities, exploitations, and patterns of domination and exclusion inevitably involved. The power of national loyalty requires some transcendent appeal of this kind, invoking "the links between the dead and the yet unborn, the mystery of regeneration . . . a combined connectedness, fortuity, and fatality in a language of continuity." (Eley and Suny 24) [SoundBite #446]
447) It is this inescapable sense of human responsibility that fills the past with poignant "might-have-beens," and the future with portentous "ifs." (Herbert J. Muller 37) [SoundBite #447]
448) It is often said that history is written by the victors. It might also be said that history is forgotten by the victors. They can afford to forget, while losers are unable to accept what happened and are condemned to brood over it, relive it, and reflect how different it might have been. (Peter Burke 106) [SoundBite #448]
449) Each society has its regime of truth, its "general politics" of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (Michel Foucault 131) [SoundBite #449]
450) This research that has continued unabated since the 1960s has fundamentally altered the relationship between history and democratic nationalism. There has been an avalanche of information -- much of it unassimilable into an account written to celebrate the nation's accomplishments. This raises very forcefully the disturbing possibility that the study of history does not strengthen an attachment to one's country. Indeed . . . open-ended investigation of the nation's past could weaken the ties of citizenship by raising critical issues about the distribution of power and respect. (Joyce Appleby et. al. 158-59) [SoundBite #450]
