Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.
611-620 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]
< 601-610 611-620 621-630 631-640 641-650 >
611) It may be propaganda, but it all serves a purpose. It's there so we can have something to identitfy with. Some of America's greatest heroes, as we have found out, have been largely fabricated. This doesn't upset me that much. I believe what I want to believe, either way. Sure, we've been lied to by people, but that is the way our political and governmental system operates nowadays. This is the sad fact. You can't turn bitter because of the lies they try to tell us. Make up some lies of your own. The Machine doesn't stop because you're pissed off; we all need to gain a greater understanding of how this system works so we can see through the rhetoric to what is actually important to us, whatever that may be. (James Clewley, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #256]
612) 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 1. Carry on "disinterested scholarship.". . . The university and its scholars . . . should unashamedly declare that their interest is in eliminating war, poverty, race and national hatred, governmental restrictions on individual freedom, and in fostering a spirit of cooperation and concern in the generation growing up. (Howard Zinn 8-9, 9-10) [SoundBite #39]
613) What a [history] textbook reflects is thus a compromise, an America sculpted and sanded down by the pressures of diverse constituents and interest groups. (Frances FitzGerald, America 46-47) [SoundBite #289]
614) Dramatic license for film is one thing. But don't dramatize a text book. It's down right criminal. We live in a world that depends on large fat hard cover books with editors and historians to be fact. So we can quote them in our paper and get an "A" for sounding brillant. I do not want the USA fabricated. . . . Once I know I've been lied to by some one, I can never trust that person again. I must say, I feel the same way about our government for trying to shove that garbage propaganda down my throat. (Dan Gibbs, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #245]
615) While it is the wish of historians that historical films remain true to their content -- either in detail or in spirit -- films too often sacrifice authenticity for the sake of profit. That, in and of itself, tells us something! Why would a specific deviation from the historical record appeal to a wider audience? to which audience? Even when decisions are made for purely entertainment purposes (and it's never "purely" if you look closely enough), they still are loaded with other layers of meaning. It is not enough to dismiss a movie because the history was terrible. One must ask why? (Patrick O'Brien, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #3660]
616) History-making, then, is a creative enterprise, by means of which we fashion out of fragments of human memory and selected evidence of the past a mental construct of a coherent past world that makes sense to the present. (Gerda Lerner 107) [SoundBite #215]
617) The value of the historical film for Zemon Davis resides in its ability to serve as a kind of "thought experiment" about the past, an imaginative activity that allows us to leave the present behind, to project ourselves into a world that is not stamped by our habitual social understandings and our programmed sense of sexuality, family, religion, and interpersonal relations. (Robert Burgoyne 10) [SoundBite #1369]
618) [T]ruth is a market commodity, determined by what will sell. (Frances FitzGerald, America 31) [SoundBite #176]
619) History is one of a series of discourses about the world. These discourses do not create the world (that physical stuff on which we apparently live) but they do appropriate it and give it all the meanings it has. (Keith Jenkins, Re-Thinking 5) [SoundBite #180]
620) The closing chapters on history textbooks might become inquiry exercises, directing students toward facts and readings on both sides of such issues. Surely such an approach would prepare students for their six decades of life after high school better than today's mindlessly upbeat textbook endings. (James W. Loewen 262) [SoundBite #1332]
