Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.
511-520 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]
< 501-510 511-520 521-530 531-540 541-550 >
511) Unfortunately, when it comes to the deep seated disgust with America and its major institutions, the personal biases of the entertainment establishment show up with increasing regularity in the movies, television, and popular music. (Michael Medved 218) [SoundBite #511]
512) We can view the past, and achieve our understanding of the past, only through the eyes of the present. The historian is of his own age, and is bound to it by the conditions of human existence. (Edward Hallett Carr 19) [SoundBite #512]
513) A tradition lives only when each succeeding generation recreates it. (Waldo Frank, qtd. in Kammen, Mystic 303) [SoundBite #513]
514) Our values are not matters of whim and happenstance. History has given them to us. They are anchored in our national experience, in our great national documents, in our national heroes, in our folk ways, traditions, and standards. People with a different history will have differing values. But we believe that our own are better for us. They work for us; and, for that reason, we live and die by them. (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. 82) [SoundBite #514]
515) It is not enough to dismiss a movie because the history was terrible. One must ask why? (Patrick O'Brien, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #3661]
516) Professor Trevor-Roper tells us that the historian "ought to love the past." This is a dubious injunction. To love the past may easily be an expression of the nostalgic romanticism of old men and old societies, a symptom of loss of faith and interest in the present or future. Cliché for cliché, I should prefer the one about freeing oneself from the "dead hand of the past." The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present. (Edward Hallett Carr 20) [SoundBite #516]
517) If history has been a maker of nations, her role as their continuing inspirer is almost equally important. (Allan Nevins 241) [SoundBite #517]
518) We [historians] are thus of that ancient and honorable company of wise men of the tribe, of bards and story-tellers and minstrels, of soothsayers and priests, to whom in successive ages has been entrusted the keeping of useful myths. (Carl Becker, qtd. in Hamerow 35) [SoundBite #518]
519) Historians deal, of course, in facts with an actual past, tied to a particular plane of reality and fixed immovably by the iron law of the documented date. But they deal not only in facts but in feel. . . . Albert Bushnell Hart remarked a half-century ago: "Facts as facts are no more history than recruits arrayed in battalions are an army." (Russel B. Nye, "Foreword") [SoundBite #519]
520) Students will start learning history when they see the point of doing so, when it seems interesting and important to them, and when they believe history might relate to their lives and futures. (James W. Loewen 305) [SoundBite #1325]
