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

561-570 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]

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561) What is at issue in American history, however, is not our ability to know the past but our ability to find the predecessors we need -- to think with their thoughts, to work through our own beliefs by working through their beliefs. Only thus does history become a mode of moral reflection. (David Harlan 157) [SoundBite #376]

562) More significant, however, are the "revisions" of history that can often arise without substantial new evidence, but in response to changing social values and attitudes that require that the existing evidence be reinterpreted in a way more consistent with those new values. (Mike Chopra-Gant 63) [SoundBite #1255]

563) If I were a Muslim who studied the Koran my whole life, I would probably believe that Americans are immoral, evil capitalists. But that IS EXACTLY what we are to them, and they believe they are doing God’s duty by killing Americans. This notion really really scares and perplexes me. The first issue is the thought of countries being "imaginary constructs" in the first place -- they shouldn’t really mean anything in the grand scheme of things, but they inextricably do mean a lot to us. We know through countless psychological studies that it is important for humans to belong to groups and form identities. But our "imaginary constructs" known as countries create these "fairy tales" known as text books and movies often to bond the people, exclude others and place people in opposition to each other. (Stephanie McElroy, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #527]

564) In eight years of undergraduate and graduate study at Columbia University during the 1960s, I never once was taught by a woman or non-white historian. Such an experience would be virtually impossible today. (Eric Foner x) [SoundBite #1360]

565) What people believe to be true is often more important than what is true. (David McCullough) [SoundBite #1225]

566) Cinema . . . is a contest of phantoms. (Jacques Derrida, qtd. in Ryan and Kellner, frontispiece) [SoundBite #521]

567) The majority of the people in the world think that war is a viable way to solve problems in 2009, almost 7,000 years after civilization began in the fertile crescent! (Patrick Hammond, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #1227]

568) The accuracy and adequacy of representations of past actualities, the verisimilitude or closeness to fact of what is written about them, remain the measure, in the end, of good history -- this despite all the fashionable doubts that are raised about the attainment of absolute or perfect objectivity and accuracy (which no one pretends to, anyway). (Bernard Bailyn 8) [SoundBite #520]

569) [The kind of history postmoderns admire:] History that problematizes the entire notion of historical knowledge. That foregrounds the usually concealed attitudes of historians toward their material. That reeks with provisionality and undecidability, partisanship, and even overt politics. That engages pulse and intellect simultaneously. That breaks down the convention of temporality -- rhythmic time. That does not aim at integration, synthesis, and totality. That is content with historical scraps. That is not the reconstruction of what has happened to us in the various phases of our lives, but a continuous playing with the memory of this. That is expressed not in coherent stories but in fragments and collage. (Robert A. Rosenstone 201) [SoundBite #503]

570) When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. (John Ford, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) [SoundBite #1230]