Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.
521-530 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]
< 501-510 511-520 521-530 531-540 541-550 >
521) But, as this chapter aims to demonstrate, the invocation of sanctified notions of "accuracy" or "truthfulness," as if these are unproblematic qualities possessed by "serious" academic works of history but lacking in all other forms of historical representation, is at best an anachronistic approach and at worst a positively misleading simplification of some rather complicated issues relating to the epistemological status of the traditional type of written academic history. History, as most non-historians (at least those educated within a western, Anglophone context) will understand it -- the history based on important dates, events, persons, and an underlying sense of economic, political, technological and social progress through decades and centuries past and on into the present -- is itself the product of a particular confluence of historical forces. (Mike Chopra-Gant 53) [SoundBite #1254]
522) It is only a hypothesis, but it seems possible that the conviction of the historian that he has "found" the form of his narrative in the events themselves, rather than imposed it upon them, in the way the poet does, is a result of a certain lack of linguistic self-consciousness which obscures the extent to which descriptions of events already constitute interpretations of their nature. (Hayden White, Tropic 94) [SoundBite #522]
523) With questions of national, racial, and cultural identity emerging as a central topic of debate in the United States, the American past has become a contested domain in which narratives of people excluded from traditional accounts have begun to be articulated in a complex dialogue with the dominant tradition. (Robert Burgoyne, Film 1) [SoundBite #523]
524) [Postmodernism questions] 1. the idea that there is a real, knowable past, a record of evolutionary progress of human ideas, institutions, or actions, 2. the view that historians should be objective, 3. that reason enables historians to explain the past, and 4. that the role of history is to interpret and transmit human cultural and intellectual tradition from generation to generation. (Robert A. Rosenstone 200) [SoundBite #524]
525) Events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and the highlighting of others, by characterization, motific repetition, variation of tone and point of view, alternative descriptive strategies, and the like -- in short, all of the techniques that we would normally expect to find in the emplotment of a novel or play. (Hayden White, Tropics 8) [SoundBite #525]
526) Through tradition we get our standards. By keeping our tradition alive we preserve our standards. By making our tradition vital, bringing it to bear upon current work, we may hope to produce something equivalent to the "thoroughbred" in literature. (Stuart Pratt Sherman, qtd. in Kammen, Mystic 302) [SoundBite #526]
527) It may, therefore, be worthwhile to examine the arguments for "disinterested, neutral, scientific, objective" scholarship. If there is to be a revolution in the uses of knowledge to correspond to the revolution in society, it will have to begin by challenging the rules which sustain the wasting of knowledge. Let me cite a number of them, and argue briefly for new approaches. . . . Rule 4. To be "scientific" requires neutrality. . . . Scientists do have values . . . they aim to save human life, to extend human control over the environment for the happiness of men and women. (Howard Zinn 8-9, 12) [SoundBite #119]
528) Scholars may dream of a historian's heaven. (Marshall Sahlins) [SoundBite #528]
529) We need history, but not in the same way a loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it. (Friedrich Nietzche) [SoundBite #529]
530) But is it such a bad thing for kids to "never be obliged to read history again" (filmmaker D. W. Griffith)? They apparently learn nothing from it because it is so dry, so, assuming there are some accurate movies out there, why the hell shouldn't they learn from them instead? (Amy Burchard, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #530]
