Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.
621-630 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]
< 601-610 611-620 621-630 631-640 641-650 >
621) History on film will always be a more personal and quirky reflection on the meaning of the past than is the work of written history. (Robert Rosenstone 66) [SoundBite #361]
622) To provide this analysis of national consciousness I will refer to the formation and operation of what I call the "National Symbolic" -- the order of discursive practices whose reign within a national space produces, and also refers to, the "law" in which the accident of birth within a geographic/political boundary transforms individuals into subjects of a collectively held history. Its traditional icons, its metaphors, its heroes, its rituals, and its narratives provide an alphabet for a collective consciousness or national subjectivity; through the National Symbolic the historical nation aspires to achieve the inevitability of the status of natural law, a birthright. . . . [a] pseudo-genetic condition. (Lauren Berlant 20) [SoundBite #140]
623) Nothing meaningful exists outside of discourse. (Stuart Hall) [SoundBite #136]
624) The aim of history, said Ranke, is simply to state "what has actually happened"; but this is far from being a simple business, even apart from the fact that we can never hope to know all that has actually happened. If we did know all, we should have to forget almost everything before we could understand anything -- just as our memory is an aid only because we remember no more than a minute fraction of our past experience. As it is, the main problem is not so much to fill in the many gaps in our factual knowledge as to make sense out of the vast deal that we do know. For a historical fact never speaks for itself. (Herbert J. Muller 29) [SoundBite #192]
625) The farther back we look, the more "fuzzy" history gets. There are many more different views/beliefs of older history. Is it because history is kind of like the game "telephone"? Is history destined to be distorted/destroyed/recreated/redefined? (Parimal Patel, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #1220]
626) By what right do filmmakers speak of the past, by what right do they do history? (Robert Rosenstone 65) [SoundBite #10]
627) The historical film should first bring together the foundational technical elements that define the filmmaking medium. Making those pieces fit together, the script, actors/actresses, director, production design, editing, and more is usually the most difficult task. All the while, the film must attempt to breathe life into the written historical word, do it justice, and give those involved a voice to be heard. Soon enough, the viewers should be able to forget they are simply watching something made for the screen and, instead, experience it as if they were there at the time. Only then can the viewer become, as Robert Rosenstone says, "a prisoner of history." (Calinda Roberts, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #1235]
628) There is nothing unusual or sinister in the fact that each generation rewrites history to suit its own needs, or about disagreements within the profession and among the public at large about how history should best be taught and studied. (Eric Foner xi) [SoundBite #1361]
629) The main purpose of all historical writing and research is to gain power for historians or for those they represent in the present [according to Michel Foucault]. . . . Texts -- novels, histories, and so on -- were not, in Foucault's view, the outcomes of individual thought, but "ideological products" of the dominant discourse. History was a fiction of narrative order imposed on the irreducible chaos of events in the interests of the exercise of power. And if one version of the past was more widely accepted than others, this was not because it was nearer the truth, or conformed more closely to "the evidence," but because its exponents had more power within the historical profession, or within society in general, than its critics. (Richard J. Evans 169) [SoundBite #100]
630) History is art; history is also philosophy. Lord Bolingbroke put it for all time when, drawing on the ancients, he defined History as "philosophy teaching by examples." So almost all great historians have thought, from Thucydides to Toynbee. (Henry Steele Commager 11) [SoundBite #92]
