Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.
61-70 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]
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61) Great history is written precisely when the historian's vision of the past is illuminated by insights into the problems of the present. (Edward Hallett Carr 31) [SoundBite #61]
62) Man is what has happened to him, what he has done. . . . Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is . . . history. (Julio Ortega, qtd. in Zamora 29) [SoundBite #62]
63) In response to this trans-national phenomenon, critics adhering to diverse ideological persuasions have suggested that societies in fact reconstruct their pasts rather than faithfully record them, and that they do so with the needs of contemporary culture clearly in mind—manipulating the past in order to mold the present. (Michael Kammen, Mystic 3) [SoundBite #63]
64) Every written history is a product of processes of condensation, displacement, symbolization, and qualification exactly like those used in the production of a filmed representation. It is only the medium that differs, not the way in which messages are produced. (Hayden White, "Historiography" 1194) [SoundBite #64]
65) Men make their own history, but they do not know that they are making it. (Karl Marx) [SoundBite #65]
66) 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 2. Be objective. The myth of "objectivity" in teaching and scholarship is based on a common confusion. . . . To be "objective" in writing history, for example, is as pointless as trying to draw a map which shows everything -- or even samples of everything -- on a piece of terrain. . . . A map fails us, not when it is untrue to the abstract universal of total inclusiveness, but when it is untrue to . . . some present human need. (Howard Zinn 8-9, 10-11) [SoundBite #66]
67) Of all the arts, cinema is the most important instrument. (Lenin, speaking about propaganda) [SoundBite #60]
68) A refusal to remember, according to Nobel Prize poet Czeslaw Milosz, is a primary characteristic of our age. (Lynne V. Cheyney 5) [SoundBite #68]
69) Based on a True Story proclaims a promise of veracity while whispering a discreet warning that mere "facts" alone are not sufficient. (Donald F. Stevens xi) [SoundBite #69]
70) Herodotus thought of historians as the guardians of memory, the memory of glorious deeds. I prefer to see historians as the guardians of awkward facts, the skeletons in the cupboard of the social memory. There used to be an official called the "Remembrancer." The title was actually a euphemism for debt-collector; the official's job was to remind people of what they would have liked to forget. One of the most important functions of the historian is to be a remembrancer. (Peter Burke 110) [SoundBite #70]
