Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.
461-470 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]
< 451-460 461-470 471-480 481-490 491-500 >
461) History cannot provide confirmation that something better is inevitable; but it can uncover evidence that it is conceivable. (Howard Zinn 47) [SoundBite #461]
462) The truth shall make us free / The truth shall make us free / The truth shall make us free some day / Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe / The truth shall make us free some day. (We Shall Overcome) [SoundBite #462]
463) Historians must always strive toward the unattainable ideal of objectivity. But as we respond to contemporary urgencies, we sometimes exploit the past for nonhistorical purposes, taking from the past, or projecting upon it, what suits our own society or ideology. History thus manipulated becomes an instrument less of disinterested intellectual inquiry than of social cohesion and political purpose. (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. 47) [SoundBite #463]
464) What historical film can do: 1. Comment on a tradition of representing the past . . . 2. Create a spectacle that will carry a particular feeling of how the past means . . . 3. Collapse an oral history tradition into a coherent story which carries out themes spanning large periods of time . . . 4. Ruminate on the possible meanings of historical events or eras . . . 5. Rethink and re-present the dimensions and ambiguities of a tradition, showing its continuities and ruptures through revolution and emigration . . . 6. Question the nature of the historical quest itself . . . 7. Analyze and question the images of the historical realities we think we know most clearly. (Robert A. Rosenstone 238-39) [SoundBite #464]
465) In the twentieth century United States, the narrative forms that have molded national identity most profoundly are arguably the western and the war film, genres that articulate an image of a nation that . . . has been "beaten into national shape by the hammer of incessant wars." (Robert Burgoyne, Film 8) [SoundBite #465]
466) Naturally, men scared to make pictures about the American Negro, men who only in the last year allowed the word Jew to be spoken in a picture, who took more than ten years to make an anti-fascist picture, these are frightened men and you pick frightened men to frighten first. (Lillian Hellman, qtd. in Mintz and Roberts 21) [SoundBite #466]
467) History should be studied because it is an absolutely necessary enlargement of human experience, a way of getting out of the boundaries of one's own life and culture and seeing more of what human experience has been. (Bernard Bailyn 12) [SoundBite #467]
468) Comfortable minds breed bad history. (Daniel J. Walkowitz 52) [SoundBite #468]
469) He is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins. (Frederick Douglass, qtd. in Moore front cover) [SoundBite #469]
470) In 1910 the American historian, Carl Becker, argued in deliberately provocative language that "the facts of history do not exist for any historian till he creates them." (Edward Hallett Carr 15) [SoundBite #470]
