Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.
471-480 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]
< 451-460 461-470 471-480 481-490 491-500 >
471) There can be no "pure history" -- history-in-itself, recorded from nobody's point of view, for nobody's sake. The most objective history conceivable is still a selection and an interpretation, necessarily governed by some special interests and based on some particular beliefs. . . . The important meanings of history are not simply there, lined up, waiting to be discovered. (Herbert J. Muller 32-33) [SoundBite #471]
472) For who among us can hope that his son shall ever be called, like Washington, to direct the storm of war, or to ravish the ears of deeply listening Senates?…Oh no! give us his private virtues! In these every youth is interested, because every youth may become a Washington. (Mason Weems, qtd. in Hirsch 88-89) [SoundBite #472]
473) If you want to see the movies that are history lessons then stay at home and watch Discovery or TLC. Some would say the movie theater is a place to live another life without coming out broke (although movies are pretty expensive and can put a hurtin' on your wallet), injured, or in trouble with the law. (Matthew Yencha, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #473]
474) Froude's remark that history is "a child's box of letters with which we can spell any word we please" [amounts to total skepticism]. (Edward Hallett Carr 21) [SoundBite #474]
475) The fading away of the cold war has brought an era of ideological conflict to an end. But it has not, as forecast, brought an end to history. (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. 9) [SoundBite #475]
476) Today, [history] texts are written backward or inside out, as it were, beginning with public demand and ending with the historian. (Frances FitzGerald, America 69) [SoundBite #476]
477) In its range and coverage of the field of national imaginings, the Hollywood cinema is in many ways an unparalleled expression of national culture, one that has molded the self-image of the nation in pervasive and explicit ways. (Robert Burgoyne, Film 6) [SoundBite #477]
478) The condition of man requires that the individual, while he exists and acts as an autonomous being, does so only because he can first identify himself as something greater -- as a member of a society, group, class, state or nation, of some arrangement to which he may not attach a name, but which he recognizes instinctively as home. (Roger Scruton 156) [SoundBite #478]
479) When new preoccupations arise in our own times and lives, the spotlight shifts, throwing into sharp relief things that were always there but that earlier historians had casually excised from the collective memory. In this sense, the present may be said to re-create the past. (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. 46) [SoundBite #479]
480) Unofficial forms of collective rememoration, including film and television programs based on historical subjects, have thus become increasingly important in the 1980s and 1990s in terms of their visibility and in terms of their influence on emerging and traditional concepts of collective memory. (Robert Burgoyne, Film 4) [SoundBite #480]
