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

451-460 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]

<  451-460  461-470  471-480  481-490  491-500  >

451) The corruption of history by nationalism is instructive. Nationalism remains, after two centuries, the most vital political emotion in the world – far more vital than social ideologies such as communism or fascism or even democracy. (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. 47) [SoundBite #451]

452) The contemporary historical film is, in this sense, a privileged discursive site in which anxiety, ambivalence, and expectation about the nation, its history, and its future are played out in narrative form. (Robert Burgoyne, Film 11) [SoundBite #452]

453) When I consider history, I try to imagine a human condition, peering out at the world through human eyes, with a life that has gone by, hanging in time like an ant in amber. (Peter Weisman, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #453]

454) Those who command more obvious forms of power (political control and wealth) try also to commandeer knowledge. (Howard Zinn 7) [SoundBite #454]

455) The shift in emphasis between a film that is “about” historical events and one that merely uses these to establish the mise-en-scene within which an explicitly fictional narrative takes place may be a very subtle one for moviegoers. It is, however, a crucial one when considering whether the film can be regarded as a reliable depiction of the historical. (Mike Chopra-Gant 79) [SoundBite #1252]

456) Although there are many similarities between the roles of tradition and memory in the United States and in other societies, ultimately the differences seem more interesting and revealing. The differences have less to do with what is remembered, or how traditions are transmitted, and more to do with the politics of culture, with the American quest for consensus and stability, and with the broad acceptance of the notion that government’s role as a custodian of memory ought to be comparatively modest. (Michael Kammen, Mystic 14) [SoundBite #456]

457) If film is to write history, we must demand of it more than a lie that is like truth, and more than a fiction that provides a "way of looking at history." If we do not, we shall get what we have always got. We shall continue to get films that are sometimes compelling, sometimes beautiful, sometimes deeply moving, but historically unsound and, with few exceptions, intellectually empty. What we must demand are films that both "get the data exactly right" and give us ways to look at our history -- and force us, through their style, to think about them. (Kenneth M. Cameron 239) [SoundBite #457]

458) We are ruled by precedents fully as much as by laws, which is to say that we are ruled by the collective memory of the past. (Joseph R. Strayer, qtd. in Hamerow 231) [SoundBite #458]

459) But as Homi Bhabha reminds us, a nation's existence is also dependent on "a strange forgetting of the history of the nation's past: the violence involved in establishing the nation's writ. It is this forgetting -- a minus in the origin -- that constitutes the beginning of the nation's narrative." (Cecilia Elizabeth O' Leary 5) [SoundBite #459]

460) The literary historian employs his talents to conjure up what was once real and is now no more, and to excite the imagination of the beholder to see the past through his eyes. . . . All this is a far cry from the more prosaic and realistic purposes of the scientific historian. (Henry Steele Commager 8) [SoundBite #76]