Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.
81-90 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]
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81) The time will come, and in less than ten years, when the children in the public schools will be taught practically everything by moving pictures. Certainly they will never be obliged to read history again. (D. W. Griffith, qtd. in Stevens 1) [SoundBite #81]
82) Is it possible to tell historical stories on film and yet not lose our [historians] professional or intellectual souls? (Robert Rosenstone 24) [SoundBite #82]
83) Culture is a way in which we make sense of, or give meaning to, things of one sort or another. (Stuart Hall) [SoundBite #83]
84) There will always be a connection between the way in which men contemplate the past and the way in which they contemplate the present. (Thomas Buckle, qtd. by Marwick 326) [SoundBite #84]
85) Do not applaud me, Fustel de Coulanges told his rapt students. "It is not I who address you, but history that speaks through my mouth." This claim of utter impersonality encouraged the monumental unimaginativeness of German scholarship, which still awes American universities and dehumanizes the humanities. It implied that the significance of human history was to be discovered by a systematic avoidance of significant generalization or judgment. (Herbert J. Muller 28) [SoundBite #85]
86) The ethnic revolt against the melting pot has reached the point, in rhetoric at least, though not I think in reality, of a denial of the idea of a common culture and a single society. (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. 133) [SoundBite #86]
87) Contemporary historians write history not to deepen our indebtedness to the past but to liberate us from the past. (David Harlan xv) [SoundBite #87]
88) National identities are not things we are born with, but are formed and transformed within and in relation to "representation." We only know what it is to be "English" because of the way "Englishness" has come to be represented, as a set of meanings, by English national culture. It follows that a nation is not only a political entity but something which produces meanings -- "a system of cultural representation." People are not only legal citizens of a nation; they participate in the "idea" of the nation as represented in its national culture. A nation is a symbolic community. (Stuart Hall 292) [SoundBite #88]
89) Whether consensually or passively transmitted, national identity requires self-ablation. Citizenship becomes equivalent to life itself and also looms as a kind of death penalty: both activity in and exile from the political public sphere feel like cruel and unusual punishment. It is apparently a quality of nations to claim legal and moral privilege, to inspire identification and sacrifice. (Lauren Berlant 4) [SoundBite #80]
90) People who have tradition are oppressed by tradition, and people who are without it are oppressed by the lack of it -- or by whatever else they have put in its place. (Ellen Glasgow, qtd. in Kammen, Mystic 309) [SoundBite #500]
