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

601-610 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]

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601) By taking the government's side, textbooks encourage students to conclude that criticism is incompatible with citizenship. (James W. Loewen 231) [SoundBite #1330]

602) The ability to separate what you know about history and celluloid representation is a distinction most human beings don't make. It just so easy to view a story in which the representation consumes the entire being. Even if we don't consciously acknowledge what Barthes calls "the balcony of History," we all think about a director's choice and the medium used to portray it. (Teresa Salvatore) [SoundBite #1224]

603) The past is no highway to the present; it is a collection of issues and events that do not fit together and that lead in no single direction. The word “progress” has been replaced by the word “change.” (Frances FitzGerald, America 11) [SoundBite #90]

604) Why do we believe history if we don't know how truthful it is? Based on trust? Faith? (Parimal Patel, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #1223]

605) I will consider the historical work as what it most manifestly is -- that is to say, a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them. (Hayden White, Metahistory 2) [SoundBite #301]

606) In 1925 the American Legion declaimed that the ideal textbook: must inspire the children with patriotism...must be careful to tell the truth optimistically...must dwell on failure only for its value as a moral lesson, must speak chiefly of success...must give each State and Section full space and value for the achievements of each. (James W. Loewen 265-66) [SoundBite #1289]

607) A historical awareness brings about a veritable catharsis, a liberation of our sociological subconscious somewhat analogous to that which psychoanalysis seeks to establish on the psychological level. . . . In each case man frees himself from a past which up until that moment had weighed upon him obscurely. He does this not by forgetfulness but by the effort of finding it again, by assimilating it in a fully conscious way so as to integrate it. (Henri-Irenee Marrou 146) [SoundBite #288]

608) Know this: When you hear people bashing Christopher Columbus, as they did incessantly during the five-hundredth anniversary celebrations in 1992, Columbus himself is merely a symbol, a vehicle, a retrospective scapegoat; their real target is America and Western civilization. (Rush Limbaugh 68) [SoundBite #89]

609) Let's be blunt and admit it: historical films trouble and disturb professional historians. . . . Why do historians distrust the historical film? The overt answers: Films are inaccurate. They distort the past. They fictionalize, trivialize, and romanticize people, events, and movements. They falsify history. The covert answers: Film is out of the control of the historians. Film shows that we [historians] do not own the past. Film creates a historical world with which books cannot compete, at least for popularity. Film is a disturbing symbol of an increasingly postliterate world (in which people can read but won't). (Robert A. Rosenstone 46) [SoundBite #261]

610) According to the postmodern critique, scholarly written histories must themselves be viewed as representations of the past – the fragmentary and essentially ambiguous raw material of historical data transformed into a coherent story that brings the past to life – rather than as a neutral mirror that reflects the past without altering or distorting it in any way. Thus the practice of writing history is inevitably enmeshed in its own system of representation. (Mike Chopra-Gant 55) [SoundBite #1256]