The following compilation of over 500 "sound bites" might serve as a kind of Bartlett's Quotations or Pascal's Pensees for the study of film and history.  Several sound bites -- such as numbers 7 and 536 are accompanied by audio glosses, and more will be in the future.

Users are invited to jump in to this collection of sound bites anywhere and to keep jumping, enjoying the stimulating juxtapositions of ideas.  There is no pre-conceived, organizing principle.  The list is consciously random, consciously a postmodern cacophany of diverse voices -- a veritable heteroglossia! -- designed to encourage critical thinking by making users make meaning.

But this compilation can have at least seven very practical uses for teachers and students:

1) as a record of some of the major ideas in the film and history field, it can
    help structure presentations

2) since quotes can be pasted right into presentations, projects, or notes, the
    list can be a time saver

3) it can provide "thought starters" for class discussions or online discussions

4) it's a resource for possible essay topics

5) it contains quotations suitable for discussion-type essay exam questions

6) it can be used to script web projects, Power Point presentations, videos,
    newsletters, and so forth

7) it can make some important ideas available even when easy access to the
    texts or a library is not convenient.

The sound bites are numbered and chunked in sets of 25 for easy reference, and there is a master index of authors at the end of this page.  Users are invited to suggest additions to this list.

1)  The reasons [for teaching history in school] are many, but none are more important to a democratic society than this: knowledge of history is the precondition of political intelligence.  Without history, a society shares no common memory of where it has been, what its core values are, or what decisions of the past account for present circumstances.  Without history, we cannot undertake any sensible inquiry into the political, social, or moral issues in society.  And without historical knowledge and inquiry, we cannot achieve the informed, discriminating citizenship essential to effective participation in the democratic processes of governance and the fulfillment for all our citizens of the nation's democratic ideals.  (National Standards for United States History 1)

2)  Once, not very long ago, history was one of our primary forms of moral reflection.  American history and intellectual historians wrote broad-gauged, morally instructive histories -- histories that taught us how to speak in the first-person plural, histories that reminded us of what we, as a people, have always wished to become. . . . American historians no longer write that kind of history, of course.  It has come to seem moralistic and elitist -- and worst of all, grossly insensitive to the racial and ethnic diversity of the American past.  (David Harlan xv)

3) For a people to be without history, or to be ignorant of its history, is as for a man to be without memory -- condemned forever to make the same discoveries that have been made in the past, invent the same techniques, wrestle with the same problems, commit the same errors; and condemned, too, to forfeit the rich pleasures of recollection.  Indeed, just as it is difficult to imagine history without civilization, so it is difficult to imagine civilization without history.  (Henry Steele Commager 2)

4)  As we historians become absorbed in our stories, we like to forget that all history, including written history, is a construction, not a reflection.  That history (as we practice it) is an ideological and cultural product of the Western World at a particular time in its development.  That history is a series of conventions for thinking about the past.  That the claims of history for universality are no more than the grandiose claims of any knowledge system.  That language itself is only a convention for doing history -- one that privileges certain elements: fact, analysis, linearity.  The clear implication: history need not be done on the page.  It can be a mode of thinking that utilizes elements other than the written word: sound, vision, feeling, montage.  (Robert Rosenstone 11)

5)  Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.  (Abraham Lincoln, qtd. in Kammen, Mystic 2)

6)  Ronald Reagan, a man of the movies before he was one of politics, seemed occasionally unable or unwilling to distinguish between the world that is in films from the world that is not.  He told audiences of a bomber pilot's decision to go down with his injured comrade rather than bail out.  The pilot, Reagan said, was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.  In 1983, Reagan told the Israeli prime minister of his horror at seeing the Nazi death camps when he visited them after the war as a member of a military film crew.  Neither story was true.  The heroic scene in the bomber described by Reagan came entirely from the 1944 picture, Wing and a Prayer, and Reagan never served on a film crew in Germany; his whole military career was spent in Los Angeles, making movies.  (Phillip L. Gianos xi)

7)  A nation can therefore be defined as a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members.  (Anthony D. Smith 14)  (click here for an audio gloss by Edward J. Gallaghet)

8)  Historical films help to shape the thinking of millions.  Often the depictions seen on the screen influence the public's view of historical subjects much more than books.  (Robert Brent Toplin, History vi)

9)  The historian, by habit, is a passive reporter, studying the combatants of yesterday, while those of today clash outside his window. . . . in a world where children are still not safe from starvation or bombs, should not the historian thrust himself and his writing into history, on behalf of goals in which he deeply believes?  Are we historians not humans first, and scholars because of that?  (Howard Zinn 1)

10)  By what right do filmmakers speak of the past, by what right do they do history?  (Robert Rosenstone 65)

11)  We should not assume that history is merely a book of recipes to be consulted.  That risks grave error and may well lead us to miss a major advantage of historical study.  It is the process of entering into the past, making a segment of it for a time into our present, that is often as important as the information we learn. . . . If we rearrange the past when we write or speak about it, so too does the study of earlier times change us.  Transformation results when we place ourselves in the position of other people in bygone times.  Historical study can pull us away from self-centeredness . . . a necessary first step in the development of maturity and wisdom.  (Stephen Vaughn 6)

12)  When one is too curious about the practices of past centuries, one ordinarily remains very ignorant of the practices of this one.  (Descartes)

13)  The historian, then, is an individual human being.  Like other individuals, he is also a social phenomenon, both the product and the conscious or unconscious spokesman of the society to which he belongs; it is in this capacity that he approaches the facts of the historical past.  (Edward Hallett Carr 29)

14)  Suppose that all knowledge of the gradual steps of civilization, of the slow process of perfecting the arts of life and the natural sciences were blotted out . . . suppose a race of men whose minds, by a paralytic stroke of fate, had suddenly been deadened to every recollection, to whom the whole world was new.  Can we imagine a condition of such utter helplessness, confusion, and misery?  (Frederic Harrison, qtd. in Commager 2-3)

15)  In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community -- and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.  (Benedict Anderson 5-6)  (click here for an audio gloss by Edward J. Gallagher)

16)  History textbooks for elementary and secondary schools are not like other kinds of histories.  They serve a different function, and they have their own traditions, which continue independent of academic history writing.  In the first place, they are essentially nationalistic histories. . . . In the second place, they are written not to explore but to instruct -- to tell children what their elders want them to know about their country.  This information is not necessarily what anyone considers the truth of things.  Like time capsules, the texts contain the truths selected for posterity.  (Frances Fitzgerald, America 47)

17)  It is time for historians to accept the mainstream historical film as a new kind of history that, like all history, operates within certain limited boundaries. . . . We must begin to think of history on film as closer to past forms of history, as a way of dealing with the past that is more like oral history, or history told by bards, or griots in Africa, or history contained in classic epics.  Perhaps film is the postliterate equivalent of the preliterate way of dealing with the past, of those forms of history in which scientific, documentary accuracy was not yet a consideration, forms in which any notion of fact was of less importance than the sound of a voice, the rhythm of a line, the magic of words.  One can have similar aesthetic moments in film. . . . Such elements may well detract from the documentary aspect, yet they add something as well, even if we do not yet know how to evaluate that "something."  (Robert Rosenstone 78)

18)  If you want to send a message in Hollywood, use Western Union.  (attributed to Hollywood movie producer Samuel Goldwyn)

19)  The director [in the movie Sweet Liberty (1986)] holds up a cautionary hand.  "Movie audiences are made up mostly of people between fifteen and twenty-two," he says.  "They want to see three things: people defying authority, people destroying property, and people taking their clothes off."  He is making a movie about the American Revolution.  When the facts of history conflict with the audience's demands, he tells us, the audience wins.  Put movies in one pan of the scale and history in the other, and history turns out to be made of feathers.  (Kenneth M. Cameron 7)

20)  Tradition is as inalienable as blood inheritance.  In short, we shall resemble our past as a son his father, but we shall be so different that our past would scarcely recognize us and would probably disown us.  (Ralph Barton Perry, qtd. in Kammen, Mystic 2)

21)  The melting pot idea hasn’t worked out as some thought it would, and now some people say that the people of the United States are more like a salad bowl than a melting pot.  (Frances FitzGerald, America 8)

22)  Is it not time that we scholars began to earn our keep in this world? . . . Like politicians, we have thrived on public innocence.  Occasionally, we emerge from the library stacks to sign a petition or deliver a speech, then return to produce even more of inconsequence.  We are accustomed to keeping our social commitment extracurricular and our scholarly work safely neutral. . . . We publish while others perish.  (Howard Zinn 5)

23)  History is but a pack of tricks we play on the dead.  (Voltaire)

24)  Memory, as we all know, is fitful and phantasmagoric.  History is organized memory, and the organization is all-important.  (Henry Steele Commager 3)

25)  The crude commercialism of America…[is] entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie….  (Oscar Wilde, qtd. in Hirsch 24)

26)  A film is not a book.  An image is not a word.  This is easy to see (and say) but difficult to understand.  At the very least it means that film cannot possibly do what a book does, even if it wanted to do so.  And, conversely, a book cannot do what film does. . . . The larger point: the rules to evaluate historical film cannot come from the medium itself -- from its common practices, and how they intersect with notions of the past.  The rules of visual history have yet to be charted.  (Robert Rosenstone 14-15)

27)  A recurrent myth . . . is that of the "founding fathers." . . . Generally speaking, what happens in the case of these myths is that differences between past and present are elided, and unintended consequences are turned into conscious aims, as if the main purpose of these past heroes had been to bring about the present -- our present.  (Peter Burke 110)

28)  Historical study can enhance personal freedom.  We owe much of our identity to our personal histories, which we call memory . . . and without it we cannot make decisions, improve the quality of our lives, or perhaps even survive.  History is society's memory, and a society that has forgotten its past is condemned to confusion just as certainly as the amnesiac.  (StephenVaughn 8)

29)  Martin Luther King once said reading history made him feel "eternally in the red."  (David Harlan xv)

30)  There is no guarantee that images will work in the way we think they will when we create them.  (Sut Jhally in Stuart Hall)

31)  The historian is part of history.  The point in the procession at which he finds himself determines his angle of vision over the past.  (Edward Hallett Carr 30)

32)  "Happy is the people that is without a history," wrote Christopher Dawson, "and thrice happy is the people without a sociology, for as long as we possess a living culture we are unconscious of it, and it is only when we are in danger of losing it or when it is already dead that we begin to realize its existence and to study it scientifically." . . . A little consciousness is a dangerous thing.  And so we had better strive to become clearly and fully conscious, of who we are, where we are, and how we got this way.  (Herbert J. Muller 27)

33)  In the modern world, the national cultures into which we are born are one of the principal sources of cultural identity.  In defining ourselves we sometimes say we are English or Welsh or Indian or Jamaican.  Of course, this is to speak metaphorically.  Those identities are not literally imprinted in our genes.  However, we do think of them as if they are part of our essential natures.  (Stuart Hall 291)

34)  First, and if not most important, then, most elementary, history is a story.  That was its original character, and that has continued to be its most distinctive character.  If history forgets or neglects to tell a story, it will inevitably forfeit much of its appeal and much of its authority as well.  With the Iliad and the Odyssey story-telling and history are so inextricably co-mingled that we do not know to this day whether to classify them as literature or as history; they are of course both.  (Henry Steele Commager 3)

35)  The past we choose to remember defines in large measure our national character, transmits the values and self-images we hold dear, and preserves the events, glorious and shameful, extraordinary and mundane, that constitute our legacy from the past and inspire our hopes for the future.  (Gary Nash et. al. ix)

36)  That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would have like to have been; or that which we hope to be.  Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.  (Ralph Ellison, qtd. in Kammen, Mystic 2)

37)  History is as much an art as a science.  (Ernest Renan)

38)  Those who in the sixties complained of the bland optimism, the chauvinism, and the materialism of their old civics texts did so in the belief that, for all their protests, the texts would never change.  (Frances FitzGerald, America 9)

39)  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)

40)  Just as a good interrogator looks behind the suspects’ story or alibi, so must we probe inside and behind the image.  (Sut Jhally in Stuart Hall)

41)  The most direct route to the American mind was through the nation’s great agencies of mass communication.  (William L. Van Deburg 19)

42)  Movies do more than entertain.  They also teach, whether or not individual filmmakers have such intentions or pretensions.  (Carlos E. Cortes 53)

43)  The first [question] is that of the relative adequacy of what we might call "historiophoty"  (the representation of history and our thought about it in filmic images and filmic discourse) to the criteria of truth and accuracy presumed to govern the professional practice of historiography (the representation of history in verbal images and written discourse).  (Hayden White, Historiography 1193)

44)  Traditional histories do not take the nation at its own word, but, for the most part, they do assume that the problem lies with the interpretation of "events" that have a certain transparency or privileged visibility.  (Homi K. Bhabha 3)

45)  What happens when people of different ethnic origins, speaking different languages and professing different religions, settle in the same geographic locality and live under the same political sovereignty?  Unless a common purpose binds them together, tribal hostilities will drive them apart.  (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. 10)

46)  Like writing history with lightning.  (Woodrow Wilson, in regard to Birth of a Nation)

47)  Many critics have labeled Hollywood a “dream factory,” claiming that its filmmakers purvey escapism and mindless entertainment.  (Leslie Fishbein 75)

48)  History as a record consists of three states, or processes, usually so skillfully blended that they appear to be a single one. . . . the collection of what are thought to be relevant facts . . . the organization of those facts into some coherent pattern . . . interpretation of the facts and of the pattern.  (Henry Steele Commager 5)

49)  The rages of ages will inform.  (Thomas Hardy, qtd. in Nash et. al. 259)

50)  I  remember as a kid hearing that in Germany they didn't teach the holocaust in the history books so that kids didn't think badly about their country -- I was appalled.  But Americans do the same thing.  We know how strong a collective memory is in promoting nationalism and therefore do not want to besmudge our "America rules" image with "bad" American history.  (Wendy Kuhn, Lehigh University)

51)  The chief value of history is that it is an extension of the personal memory, and an extension which the masses can share.  (Carl Becker, qtd in Vaughn 19)

52)  Thomas Jefferson long ago prescribed history for all who would take part in self-government because it would enable them to prepare for things yet to come.  (National Standards for United States History 1)

53)  Fact is skeleton, armature; history is body: the historian is related to God in the ability, occasionally, to take a rib and create life.  (Kenneth M. Cameron 7)

54)  Film is history as vision.  The long tradition of oral history has given us a poetic relationship to the world and our past, while written history, especially in the last two centuries, has created an increasingly linear, scientific world on the page.  Film changes the rules of the historical game, insisting on its own sort of truths which arise from a visual and aural realm that is difficult to capture adequately in words.  (Robert Rosenstone 15)

55)  In the notion of representation is the idea of giving meaning.  (Stuart Hall)

56)  The indoctrination taking place today in American academia is disingenuously described as "multiculturalism" by its academic purveyors.  A more accurate description would be "politically motivated historical and cultural distortion."  It is a primitive type of historical revisionism.  (Rush Limbaugh 66)

57)  Ideologically speaking, the histories of the fifties were implacable, seamless.  Inside their covers, America was perfect: the greatest nation in the world, and the embodiment of democracy, freedom, and technological progress.  (Frances FitzGerald, America 10)

58)  History is the fruit of power.  (Michel-Rolph Trouillot xix)

59)  Prosthetic memories are memories that circulate publicly, are not organically based, but are nevertheless experienced with one's own body -- by means of a wide range of cultural technologies -- and as such, become part of one's personal archive of experience, informing not only one's subjectivity, but one's relationship to the present and future tenses.  I call these memories prosthetic, in part, because, like an artificial limb, they are actually worn by the body; these are sensuous memories produced by experience. . . . The mass media has begun to construct sites . . . in which people are invited to enter into experiential relationships with events through which they themselves did not live.  Through such spaces people may gain access to a range of processual, sensually immersed knowledges, knowledges which would be difficult to acquire by purely cognitive means.  (Alison Landsberg 66)

60)  Of all the arts, cinema is the most important instrument.  (Lenin, speaking about propaganda)

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)

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)

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)

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)

65)  Men make their own history, but they do not know that they are making it.  (Karl Marx)

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)

67)  Written history, after all, is the application of an aesthetic vision to a welter of facts; and both the weight and the vitality of an historical work depend on the quality of the vision.  (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., qtd. in Commager 6)

68)  "A refusal to remember," according to Nobel Prize poet Czeslaw Milosz, is a primary characteristic of our age.  (Lynne V. Cheyney 5)

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)

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)

71)  It [an event, object, etc.] doesn’t exist meaningfully until after it’s been represented.  (Stuart Hall)

72)  History is a kind of research or inquiry . . . . generically it belongs to what we call the sciences; that is, forms of thought whereby we ask questions and try to answer them. . . . Science is finding things out: and in that sense history is a science. . . . What kinds of things does history find out?  I answer, res gestae; actions of human beings that have been done in the past. . . . history is the science of res gestae, the attempt to answer questions about human actions done in the past.  (R. G. Collingwood 9)

73)  The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. . . . We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.  Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.  (Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress, 1862)

74)  The society that was once uniform is now a patchwork of rich and poor, old and young, men and women, blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Indians.  (Frances FitzGerald, America 11)

75)  One of the signs of emerging democracy in countries that until recently have been ruled by authoritarian governments is that the citizens start arguing publicly about history.  (Gary Nash et. al. 259)

76)  The literary historian employs his talents to conjure up what was once real and is now no more, and to excite the imagination of the beholder to see the past through his eyes. . . . All this is a far cry from the more prosaic and realistic purposes of the scientific historian.  (Henry Steele Commager 8)

77)  History, by apprizing them [citizens] of the past, will enable them to judge of the future, it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views.  (Thomas Jefferson, qtd. in Bennett, Children 160)

78)  Recall Rousseau’s accusation : “We have physicists, geometricians, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians, and painters in plenty, but we have no longer a citizen among us.”  Since the eighteenth century, that list of specialists has grown, to include sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, historians.  The scholars multiply diligently, but with little passion.  The passion I speak of is the urgent desire for a better world.  I will contend that it should overcome those professional rules which call, impossibly and callously, for neutrality.  (Howard Zinn 1-2)

79)  The knowledge of past events is the sovereign corrective of human nature.  (Polybius of Megalopolis, c. 200 B.C.)

80)  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)

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)

82)  Is it possible to tell historical stories on film and yet not lose our [historians] professional or intellectual souls?  (Robert Rosenstone 24)

83)  Culture is a way in which we make sense of, or give meaning to, things of one sort or another.  (Stuart Hall)

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)

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)

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)

87)  Contemporary historians write history not to deepen our indebtedness to the past but to liberate us from the past.  (David Harlan xv)

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)

89)  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)

90)  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)

91)  First, you cannot fully understand or appreciate the work of the historian unless you have first grasped the standpoint from which he himself approached it; secondly, that that standpoint is itself rooted in a social and historical background.  Do not forget that, as Marx once said, the educator himself has to be educated. . . . The historian, before he begins to write history, is the product of history.  (Edward Hallett Carr 34)

92)  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)

93)  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 3.  Stick to your discipline.  Specialization has become as absurdly extreme in the educational world as in the medical world. . . . Specialization ensures that one cannot follow a problem through from start to finish.  It ensures the functioning of the academy of the system's dictum: divide and rule.  (Howard Zinn 8-9, 11)

94)  We get our ethics from our history and judge our history by our ethics.  (Troeltsch, qtd. by Marwick 326)

95)  It is the historian's vocation to provide society with a discriminating memory.  (Michael Kammen, "On Knowing" 57)

96)  Meaning arises because of the shared conceptual maps which groups share together. (Stuart Hall)

97)  National identification is clearly a matter of . . . something transmitted from the past and secured as a collective belonging, something reproduced in myriad imperceptible ways, grounded in everydayness and mundane experience.  (Eley and Suny 22)

98)  To withhold traditional culture from the school curriculum, and therefore from students, in the name of progressive ideas is in fact an unprogressive action that helps preserve the political and economic status quo.  (E. D. Hirsch, Jr. 23-24)

99)  While states throughout the nation have been able to forge at least a grudging consensus on what students should know in the various disciplines, when it comes to history there has been one public squabble after another.  (Gary Nash et. al. 263)

100)  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)

101)  Nations, then, are imaginary constructs that depend for their existence on an apparatus of cultural fictions in which imaginative literature plays a decisive role.  (Timothy Brennan 49)

102)  But in general there has been a reluctance to consider historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences.  (Hayden White, Tropics 82)

103)  The point is clear.  Our young people are woefully ill-educated about the history and basic principles of our nation and our civilization.  (William J. Bennett, Children 161)

104)  Evidence is of course the lifeblood of history.  (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. ix)

105)  What is history for? . . . My answer is that history is "for" human self-knowledge.  It is generally thought to be of importance to man that he should know himself: where knowing himself means knowing not his merely personal peculiarities, the things that distinguish him from other men, but his nature as man. . . . The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.  (R. G. Collingwood 10)

106)  Whereas in the nineteen-fifties the [history] texts were childish in the sense that they were naïve and clumsy, they are now childish in the sense that they are polymorphous-perverse. (Frances FitzGerald, America 16)

107)  History is able to instruct without inflicting pain by affording an insight into the failures and successes of others.  (Diodorus of Agyrium, c. 50 B.C.)

108)  The philosopher Etienne Gilson noted the special significance of the perspectives history affords.  History, he remarked, is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.  (National Standards for United States History 1)

109)  The historian must have no country.  (John Adams, qtd. in Loewen, Lies My 14)

110)  It is not surprising that most modern historians have accepted E. A. Freeman's dictum that "History is past politics, past politics present history."  (Henry Steele Commager 20)

111)  More easily than the written word, the motion picture seems to let us stare through a window directly at past events, to experience people and places as if we were there.  The huge images on the screen and wraparound sounds tend to overwhelm us, swamp our senses and destroy attempts to remain aloof, distanced, or critical.  In the movie theater we are, for a time, prisoners of history.  (Robert Rosenstone 27)

112)  If history is, as the post-structuralists declare, composed of socially constructed narratives, told from particular perspectives to audiences that endlessly refashion them in changing contexts, then what remains for the historian?  (Abrash and Walkowitz 203)

113)  The quickest and surest way of finding the present in the past, but hardly the soundest, is to put it in there first.  (C. H. McIlwain, qtd. by Marwick 326)

114)  One of the most visible manifestations of this changing narrative of nation, a change that is evident throughout the spectrum of contemporary life, can be found in the resurgence of films that take the American past as their subject. . . . . the national narrative is currently being reshaped by stories that explore the meaning of nation "from below".  .  .  . a pervasive and growing tendency in contemporary American culture: the desire to remake . . . the "dominant fiction," the ideological reality or "image of social consensus" within which members of a society are asked to identify themselves.  (Robert Burgoyne, Film 1)

115)  If all I know is what I'm told, when can I learn to tell myself?  If believing is seeing, which way do I look?  History is quite intriguing, given perception is reality.  (Peter Weisman, Lehigh University)

116)  Cinematic historians have become powerful storytellers.  They are competing effectively with the schoolteacher, the college professor, and the history book author.  (Robert Brent Toplin, History ix)

117)  Conceptual maps are systems of representations.  (Stuart Hall)

118)  We have positive as well as negative assessments of the cultural role of tradition.  From an affirmative point of view, a surge of tradition can supply the basis for social cohesion, especially in a nation so heterogeneous as the United States.  Where religious, ethnic, and regional diversity are such centripetal forces, a sense of nationality and of its symptomatic “official culture” can be useful. . . . From a critical perspective, on the other hand, traditions are commonly relied upon by those who possess the power to achieve an illusion of social consensus.  Such people invoke the legitimacy of an artificially constructed past in order to buttress presentist assumptions and the authority of a regime.  (Michael Kammen, Mystic 4-5)

119)  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 4. To be "scientific" requires neutrality. . . . Scientists do have values . . . they aim to save human life, to extend human control over the environment for the happiness of men and women.  (Howard Zinn 8-9, 12)

120)  We have got to have the ugly facts in order to protect us from the official view of reality.  (Bill Moyers, qtd. in Loewen, Lies My 214)

121)  One of the jewels in democracy’s crown is an educated citizenry that welcomes new harvests of information, unsettling questions, and fresh visions that illuminate our past as well as our present conditions.  (Gary Nash et. al. 277)  (click here for an audio gloss by Stephanie McElroy)

122)  Let me translate multiculture-speak for you and put it into more direct language we all can understand: Indians are good.  White Europeans are bad.  Blacks are good.  Asians, we’re not too sure about.  Regardless of how they camouflage it, this is the essence of multiculturalism and the kind of psychobabble being disseminated in our institutions of higher learning today.  (Rush Limbaugh 69)

123)  American history is not dull any longer; it is a sensuous experience.  (Frances FitzGerald, America 16)

124)  The flux in mainstream culture is obvious to all.  But stability, not change, is the chief characteristic of cultural literacy.  (E. D. Hirsch, Jr. 29)

125)  The historical traumas of the past — slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, the assassination of President Kennedy, the Vietnam War – have now emerged as important catalysts of cultural redefinition, evidenced in the extraordinary degree of contestation and debate circulating around current historical films that deal with these events, and in controversies over recent museum exhibitions and commemorative reenactments.  (Robert Burgoyne, Film 120)

126)  The historians are the guardians of tradition, the priests of the cult of nationality, the prophets of social reform, the exponents and upholders of national virtue and glory.  (Philip Bagby, qtd. by Marwick 326)

127)  History is the summarized experience of society, as experience is the condensed history of the individual.  Without experience the individual is as lost as a baby without a mother, a learner driver without a qualified passenger, a potholer without a torch.  Without history a society scarcely exists.  (Harold Perkin 69)

128)  Often history is invoked to justify the ruling class. . . . This is top-dog history, designed to show how noble, virtuous, and inevitable existing power arrangements are.  Because it vindicates the status quo and the methods by which power is achieved and maintained, it may be called exculpatory history.  Other times history is invoked to justify the victims of power, to vindicate those who reject the status quo. . . . This is underdog history, designed to demonstrate what Bertrand Russell called "the superior virtue of the oppressed" by inventing or exaggerating past glories and purposes.  It may be called compensatory history.  (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. 49)

129)  "Truth" is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements.  (Michel Foucault 133)

130)  What we need, according to the Left, is a history that demythologizes the past, that strips away conventional pieties and ideological pretensions in order to reveal the social, economic and ideological forces that have driven American history and shaped American culture.  Instead of history as moral reflection, we get history as cultural unmasking.  (David Harlan xix)

131)  Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. . . . In all epochs of the world's history we shall find the Great Man to have been the indispensable saviour of his epoch.  (Thomas Carlyle, qtd. in Commager 24)

132)  I guess “This is true” has a really big appeal.  (Eric Foner, qtd. in Carnes 17)

133)  Historians of the last century were striving to make their subject intellectually respectable in an age of science. . . . They thought of the true scientist as one who deals in plain, unvarnished facts, never making assumptions and never being harried by doubt and dispute over fundamentals.  They thought of art as the antithesis of science, as if imagination deals only with the imaginary and can be indulged only when knowledge fails.  (Herbert J. Muller 28)

134)  I have realized as I grow older that history, in the end, has more imagination than oneself.  (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, qtd. in Zamora vi)

135)  Neither people nor nations live historical "stories"; narratives, that is, coherent beginnings, middles, and endings, are constructed by historians as part of their attempts to make sense of the past.  The narratives that historians write are in fact "verbal fictions"; written history is a representation of the past, not the past itself. . . . To the extent that written narratives are in fact "verbal fictions," then visual narratives will be "visual fictions" -- that is, not mirrors of the past but representations of it.  (Robert Rosenstone 35)

136)  Nothing meaningful exists outside of discourse.  (Stuart Hall)

137)  Today, even the very subject of history is in danger of losing its distinct identity, of becoming absorbed in the smorgasbord of this and that known as "social studies."  (William J. Bennett, Children 162)

138)  Official culture relies on “dogmatic formalism” and the restatement of reality in ideal rather than complex or ambiguous terms.  (John Bodnar 13-14)

139)  The surprise that adults feel in seeing the changes in the history texts must come from the lingering hope that there is, somewhere out there, an objective truth.  (Frances FitzGerald, America 16)

140)  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)

141)  Reason has arranged the infinite variety of History to delight the reader and educate the soul.  For inquiring souls there is nothing more attractive than History.  (Theophylactus Simocatta, c. A.D. 500)

142)  The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. . . . It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical."  (Herbert Butterfield, qtd. in Carr 35-36)

143)  A society sure of its values had needed history only to celebrate the glories of the past, but a society of changing values and consequent confusions also needed history as a utilitarian guide.  (Thomas Cochran, qtd. by Marwick 327)

144)  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 5.  A scholar must, in order to be "rational," avoid "emotionalism."  True, emotion can distort.  But it can also enhance. . . . Reason, to be accurate, must be supplemented by emotion.  (Howard Zinn 8-9, 12-13)

145)  When information which properly belongs to the public is systematically withheld by those in power, the people soon become ignorant of their own affairs, distrustful of those who manage them, and -- eventually -- incapable of determining their own destinies.  (Richard M. Nixon, qtd. in Weiner)

146)  It is true that history cannot satisfy our appetite when we are hungry, nor keep us warm when the cold wind blows.  But it is true that if younger generations do not understand the hardships and triumphs of their elders, then we will be a people without a past.  As such, we will be like water without a source, a tree without roots. --Wall inscription, New York, China History Project  (Gary Nash et. al. 3)

147)  The historian, investigating any event in the past, makes a distinction between what may be called the outside and the inside of an event. . . . The historian is never concerned with either of these to the exclusion of the other.  He is investigating not mere events (whereby a mere event I mean one which has only an outside and no inside) but actions, and an action is the unity of the outside and inside of an event.  He is interested in the crossing of the Rubicon only in its relation to Republican law. . . . His work may begin by discovering the outside of an event, but it can never end there; he must always remember that the event was an action, and that his main task is to think himself into this action, to discern the thought of its agent.  (R. G. Collingwood 213)

148)  "The historian," writes Veronica Wedgwood, "ought to be the humblest of men; he is faced a dozen times a day with the evidence of his own ignorance; he is perpetually confronted with his own humiliating inability to interpret his material correctly; he is, in a sense that no other writer is, in bondage to that material."  (Henry Steele Commager 43)

149)  Perhaps the single greatest abuse of history  is committed by those who try to make it a respository of moral examples and caveats.  The ascription of this function of history is typified in the statement of Lord Bolingbroke that "history is philosophy teaching by examples."  The concept of history as instruction for good citizenship was further elaborated by Bolingbroke in the following statement: "An application of any study, that tends neither directly nor indirectly to make us better men and better citizens, is at best but a specious and ingenious sort of idleness. . . . The study of history seems to me, of all the other, the most proper to train us up to private and public virtue."  (Lester D. Stephens 103)

150)  National cultures are composed not only of cultural institutions, but of symbols and representations.  A national culture is a "discourse" -- a way of constructing meanings which influences and organizes both our actions and are conceptions of ourselves.  (Stuart Hall 292)

151)  The preeminence of the moving image in contemporary culture has reshaped our collective imaginary relation to history.  (Robert Burgoyne, "Prosthetic")

152)  The aim of the historian, then, is to know the elements of the present by understanding what came into the present from the past, for the present is simply the developing past. . . . The goal of the historian is the living present.  (Frederick Jackson Turner 180)

153)  [F]ilm must provide a face for the faceless.  (Robert A. Rosenstone 36)

154)  Imagine a public library of the near future, for instance.  There will be long rows of boxes or pillars, properly classified and indexed, of course.  At each box a push button and before each box a seat.  Suppose you wish to "read up" on a certain episode in Napoleon's life.  Instead of consulting all the authorities, wading laboriously through a host of books, and ending bewildered, without a clear idea of exactly what did happen and confused at every point by conflicting opinions about what did happen, you will merely seat yourself at a properly adjusted window, in a scientifically prepared room, press the button, and actually see what happened.  (D. W. Griffith, qtd. in Stevens 2)

155)  Cinematic history, a curious blend of entertainment and interpretation.  (Robert Brent Toplin, History x)

156)  The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understood themselves.  (Herbert Butterfield, qtd. by Marwick 327)

157)  Intellectual honesty requires us to concede at the onset that history has little practical utility comparable to the physical sciences.  As the great British historian George Macaulay Trevelyan wrote in 1913, "No one can by the knowledge of history, however profound, invent the steam engine, or light a town, or cure cancer, or make wheat grow near the artic circle."  (William J. Bennett, Children 163)

158)  Slippery history!  (Frances FitzGerald, America 16)

159)  Movies are like commercials for history.  You get intrigued, then you go and do some research.  Some times you find that the movie portrays things accurately, sometimes you don't, but you are responsible to find these things out.  Movies may or may not be historically correct but it shouldn't matter since it isn't the responsibility of the movie makers to teach you anything, it is up to us to learn for ourselves.  (James Clewley, Lehigh University)  (click here for an audio gloss by Lindsay Totams)

160)  We [historians] can recapture those few moments in the past which show the possibility of a better way of life than that which has dominated the Earth thus far.   (Howard Zinn 47)

161)  It is essential to understand that films are a commodity intended to make money to understanding their relationship to politics and of politics' relationship to film.  The imperative that films make a profit means seeking large audiences, and seeking large audiences requires caution about a film's subject matter and treatment.  As with any other genuinely mass medium, the content and form of the films is largely dictated by economic necessities.  (Phillip L. Gianos 1)

162)  Partisanship often adds zest to historical writing; for partisanship is an expression of interest and excitement and passion, and these can stir the reader as judiciousness might not.  (Henry Steele Commager 55)

163)  Public memory is produced from a political discussion that involves not so much specific economic or moral problems but rather fundamental issues about the entire existence of a society: its organization, structure of power, and the very meaning of its past and present.  (John Bodnar 14)

164)  The challenge of film to history, of the visual culture to the written culture, may be like the challenge of written history to the oral tradition, of Herodotus and Thucydides to the tellers of historical tales.  Before Herodotus there was myth, which was a perfectly adequate way of dealing with the past of a tribe, city, or people.  (Robert Rosenstone 43)

165)  Pay attention to what they tell you to forget.  (Muriel Rukeyser, qtd. in Loewen, Lies Across 18)

166)  Divisions may spring up, ill blood may burn, parties be formed, and interests may seem to clash; but the great bonds of the nation are linked to what is past.  (Edward Everett, qtd. in Kammen, Mystic 4)

167)  Historians have become personalities on the public stage, applying makeup for the TV cameras, miking up for radio talk shows, and writing op-ed essays for the local newspapers.  (Gary Nash et. al. 7)

168)  Images have no fixed meanings. (Stuart Hall)

169)  Historical memory is the key to self-identity, to seeing one's place in the stream of time, and one's connectedness with all of humankind. . . . Denied knowledge of one's roots and of one's place in the great stream of human history, the individual is deprived of the fullest sense of self and of that sense of shared community on which one's fullest personal development as well as responsible citizenship depends.   (National Standards for United States History 2)

170)  School is the traditional place for acculturating children into our national life.  (E. D. Hirsch, Jr. 110)

171)  To speak of the necessity of history is to say that history matters essentially.  Human beings, like animals, propagate, preserve themselves and their young, seek shelter, and store food.  We invent tools, alter the environment, communicate with one another by means of symbols, and speculate about our mortality.  Once that level of social consciousness has been reached, we become concerned with immortality.  The desire of men and women to survive their own death has been the single most important force compelling them to preserve and record the past.  History is the means whereby we assert the continuity of human life -- its creation is one of the earliest humanizing activities of homo sapiens.  (Gerda Lerner 106)

172)  My purpose is merely to show how closely the work of the historian mirrors the society in which he works.  It is not merely the events that are in flux.  The historian himself is in flux.  When you take up an historical work, it is not enough to look for the author's name on the title-page: look also for the date of publication or writing -- it is sometimes even more revealing.  (Edward Hallett Carr 36)

173)  Among academic historians, agreement is widespread today that history has been presented -- whether in school textbooks, college courses, museum exhibits, or mass media -- in a narrow and deeply distorted way.  (Gary B. Nash, "American" 135)

174)  Films that take history as their subject are so controversial, I believe, mainly because of the extraordinary social power and influence that seems to have accrued to what has been called the cinematic rewriting of history.  (Robert Burgoyne, "Prosthetic")

175)  The aim of the historian, like that of the artist, is to enlarge our picture of the world, to give us a new way of looking at things.  (James Joll, qtd. by Marwick 327)

176)  [T]ruth is a market commodity, determined by what will sell.  (Frances FitzGerald, America 31)

177)  A common memory of belonging, borne by habits, customs, dialects, song, dance, pastimes, shared geography, superstition, and so on, but also fears, anxieties, antipathies, hurts, resentments is the indistinct but indispensable condition of [nationalism].  For nationalism to do its work, ordinary people need to see themselves as the bearers of an identity centered elsewhere, imagine themselves as an abstract community.  (Eley and Suny 22)

178)  We see things not as they are but as we are.  (Anais Nin, qtd. in Loewen, Lies My 239)

179)  Modern citizens are born in nations and are taught to perceive the nation as an intimate quality of identity, as intimate and inevitable as biologically-rooted affiliations through gender or family.  National subjects are taught to value certain abstract signs and stories as a part of their intrinsic relation to themselves, to all "citizens," and to the national terrain; there is said to be a common "national" character.  (Lauren Berlant 20-21)

180)  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)

181)  Interpretation is dependent on historical and cultural context.  (Stuart Hall)

182)  Film is the only art form, apart from architecture, that routinely requires financing involving millions of dollars: as Orson Welles noted, a poet needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a filmmaker an army.  Film armies -- what Welles called "this terribly expensive paintbox" -- cost money.  (Phillip L. Gianos 2)

183)  If the audience don’t like a picture, they have a good reason.  The public is never wrong.  I don’t go for all this thing that when I have a failure, it is because the audience doesn’t have the taste or education, or isn’t sensitive enough.  The public pays money.  It wants to be entertained.  That’s all I know.  (Samuel Goldwyn, qtd. in Mintz and Roberts 11)

184)  Tout comprendre, tout pardonner.  But it does not follow that the historian who understands all forgives all.  It is the historian's business to "understand"; it is not the historian's business either to condemn or forgive.  He is not God.  (Henry Steele Commager 68)

185)  I think that cinematic historians should be applauded for the efforts that they put into creating a visual portrayal of history.  I think that the American population today has lost the desire to read its history. I think that the idea of "Hollywoodization" in film is real  but how much different is it than what happens in literature.  Books are made for entertainment as well.  The fact that films get scoffed at because they are made to entertain is ridiculous, because books attempt to do the same thing or they would never sell a thing.  Cinematic historians just allow the audience to see a historical event in a different light.  (Jessica Roche, Lehigh University)

186)  Unless we know where we have been as a nation, it is impossible to know where we are going.  (Rush Limbaugh 75)

187)  [There is] the critical distinction between what happened in the past versus what we say about it.  The former is "the past," the latter "history."  (James W. Loewen, Lies Across 21)

188)  A gifted teacher of history is not only someone who encourages his or her students to develop their own powers of criticism, observation, and analysis.  He or she is also someone who can convey the emotional and romantic aspect of history.  (William J. Bennett, Children 164)

189)  The past has no meaningful existence except as it exists for us, as it is given meaning by us.  In piety and justice we try to see it as it was, or as it seemed to the men who lived it, but even this poetic interest is not disinterested; in our contemplation of the drama, we see what is most pertinent for our own hopes and fears.  Hence the past keeps changing with the present.  Every age has to rewrite its history, re-create the past; in every age a different Christ dies on the Cross, and is resurrected to a different end. . . . Our task is to create a "usable past," for our own living purposes.  (Herbert J. Muller 33)

190)  I am urging value-laden historiography. . . . What kind of awareness moves people in humanistic directions, and how can historical writing create such awareness, such movement? I can think of five ways in which history can be useful. . . . 1. We can intensify, expand, sharpen our perception of how bad things are, for the victims of the world. . . . 2. We can expose the pretensions of government to either neutrality or beneficence. . . . 3.  We can expose the ideology that pervades our culture -- using "ideology" in Mannheim's sense: rationale for the going order. . . . 4.  We can recapture those few moments in the past which show the possibility of a better way of life than that which has dominated the earth thus far. . . . 5. We can show how good social movements can go wrong, how leaders can betray their followers, how rebels can become bureaucrats, how ideals can become frozen and reified.  (Howard Zinn 36, 42, 45, 47, 51)

191)  History is unceasingly controversial because it provides so much of the substance for the way a society defines itself and considers what it wants to be.  (Gary Nash et. al. 7)

192)  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)

193)  History is necessary, not only to make life agreeable, but also to endow it with moral significance.  (Luigi Guicciardini, c. 1500 A.D.)

194)  Commemorative activities almost always stress the desirability of maintaining social order and existing institutions, the need to avoid disorder or dramatic changes, and the dominance of citizen rights.  (John Bodnar 19)

195)  In a postliterate world, it is possible that visual culture will once again change the nature of our relationship to the past.  This does not mean giving up on attempts at truth, but somehow recognizing that there may be more than one sort of historical truth, or that the truths conveyed in the visual media may be different from, but not necessarily in conflict with, truths conveyed in words.  (Robert Rosenstone 43)

196)  History free of all values cannot be written.  Indeed, it is a concept almost impossible to understand, for men will scarcely take the trouble to inquire laboriously into something which they set no value on.  (W. H. B. Court, qtd. by Marwick 327)

197)  History is the life of memory.  (Cicero)

198)  Making history means form-giving and meaning-giving. . . . As Carl Becker said: "Left to themselves, the facts do not speak . . . for all practical purposes there is no fact till someone affirms it. . . . Since history is . . . an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events its form and substance are inseparable."  (Gerda Lerner 107)

199)  The processes of nature can therefore be properly described as sequences of mere events, but those of history cannot.  They are not processes of mere events but processes of actions, which have an inner side, consisting of processes of thought.  All history is the history of thought. . . . The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind. . . . The historian not only re-enacts past thought, but he re-enacts it in the context of his own knowledge and therefore, in re-enacting it, criticizes it, forms his own judgment of its value, corrects whatever errors he can discern in it.  (R. G. Collingwood 215)

200)  Film, in effect, appears to invoke the emotional certitude we associate with memory.  Like memory, film is associated with the body; it engages the viewer at the somatic level, immersing the spectator in experiences and impressions that, like memories, seem to be "burned in."  (Robert Burgoyne, "Prosthetic")

201)  If we cannot face our history honestly, we cannot learn from the past. . . . Surely we don't want to be people of the lie, complicit with the worst in American history because we cannot stand to acknowledge it.  The way we heal is to come face-to-face with the truth, and then we can better deal with it and each other.  (James W. Loewen, Lies Across 22)

202)  The traditional view of the relation between history and memory is a relatively simple one.  The historian's function is to be a "remembrancer," the custodian of the memory of public events which are put down in writing for the benefit of the actors, to give them fame, and also for the benefit of posterity, to learn from their example.  (Peter Burke 97)

203)  We are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be.  (Michel-Rolph Trouillot xix)

204)  History, we can confidently assert, is useful in the sense that art and music, poetry and flowers, religion and philosophy are useful.  Without it -- as with these -- life would be poorer and meaner; without it we should be denied some of those intellectual and moral experiences which give meaning and richness to life.  Surely it is no accident that the study of history has been the solace of many of the noblest minds of every generation.  (Henry Steele Commager 73)

205)  Postmodernism is essentially an extension and elaboration of the old idea that we have no way of seeing or thinking or desiring that we have not acquired from the surrounding culture.  We can experience or reflect on the world -- or on ourselves, for that matter -- only through one or another culturally derived form of experiencing or reflecting.  (David Harlan xx)

206)  American historical film has been a failure at handling multifaceted historical issues -- at engaging in argument.  And no wonder; many of the films have been neoromantic moral melodrama, which are the opposite of argument.  (Kenneth M. Cameron 236)

207)  Memory is, by definition, a term which directs our attention not to the past but to the past-present relation.  It is because “the past” has this living active existence in the present that it matters so much politically.  (Johnson and Dawson, qtd. in Kammen, Mystic 5)

208)  National cultures construct identities by producing meanings about "The nation" with which we can "identify"; these are contained in the stories which are told about it, memories which connect its present with its past, and images which are constructed of it.  (Stuart Hall 293)

209)  History, despite its wrenching pain / Cannot be outlived, and if faced / With courage, need not be lived again.  (Maya Angelou, "On the Pulse of the Morning")

210)  Among good teachers, the idea persists that teaching is about transmitting culture.
(Lynne V. Cheyney 6)

211)  But the most fundamental political lesson of virtually all American films regardless of subject is that of the most enduring of all movie conventions, the happy ending: films show that, in the end, things will be all right, love will find a way, the good guys will win.  Problems may be encountered -- indeed for dramatic purposes must be encountered -- but the resolution is nearly always a happy one.  That the world is essentially fair and just is a deeply powerful political lesson.  (Phillip L. Gianos 4)

212)  [C]ontention over the past is as old as written history itself . . . and . . . continuously reexamining the past . . . is the greatest service historians can render in a democracy.  (Gary Nash et. al.  8)

213)  A mere collector of supposed facts is as useful as a collector of matchboxes.  (Lucien Febvre, qtd. by Marwick 327)

214)  History in the post-modern moment becomes histories and questions.  It asks: Whose history gets told?  In whose name?  For what purpose?  Post-modernism is about histories not told, retold, untold.  History as it never was.  Histories forgotten, hidden, invisible, considered unimportant, changed, eradicated.  It's about the refusal to see history as linear, as leading straight up to today in some recognizable pattern -- all set for us to make sense of.  It's about chance.  It's about power.  It's about information.  (Brenda Marshall 4)

215)  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)

216)  Power and ideology attempts to fix the meaning of images and languages.  (Stuart Hall)

217)  The past has gone and history is what historians make of it when they go to work.  History is the labour of historians.  (Keith Jenkins, Re-Thinking 6)

218)  At the beginning of this century, "history is the biography of great men" [Carlyle] was still a reputable dictum.  (Edward Hallett Carr 39)

219)  Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.  The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.  (Karl Marx, qtd. in Zinn 54-55)

220)  History: philosophy teaching by experience.

221)  The artificial but real experiences afforded by the cinema "might actually install in individuals 'symptoms' through which they didn't actually live, but to which they subsequently have a kind of experiential relationship."  (Robert Burgoyne, "Prosthetic")

222)  The days of heroic history are past.  (Donald F. Stevens 2)

223)  That the historian must use his imagination is a commonplace: to quote Macaulay's Essay on History, "a perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque"; but this is to underestimate the part played by the historical imagination, that "blind but indispensable faculty" without which, as Kant has shown, we could never perceive the world around us, is indispensable in the same way to history: it is this which, operating not capriciously as fancy but in its a priori form, does the entire work of historical construction.  (R. G. Collingwood 241)

224)  By the latter part of the twentieth century public memory remains a product of elite manipulation, symbolic interaction, and contested discourse.  (John Bodnar 20)

225)  History is a line we ourselves must rig up, to a past we ourselves must populate.  (David Harlan xxxii)

226)  American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.  (James Baldwin 11)

227)  Film, with its unique powers of representation, now struggles for a place within a cultural tradition which has long privileged the written word.  It's challenge is great, for it may be that to acknowledge the authenticity of the visual is to accept a new relationship to the word itself.  (Robert Rosenstone 43-44)

228)  "The passion for tidiness," Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has written, "is the historian's occupational disease."  (Henry Steele Commager 86)

229)  Patriotism should be based on the positive things that our country has done, and I believe that there must be some hiding somewhere.  Instead of being lied to, I want our children, and our childrens' children to be made aware of the struggles, the conquests, and the downfalls that our country has been through. I (optimistically) believe that there is a way to keep patriotism alive without changing the past.  (Jennifer Lackner, Lehigh University)

230)  A man without a nation defies the recognized categories and provokes revulsion. . . . A man must have a nationality as he must have a nose and two ears.  (Ernest Gellner 6)

231)  Most [American historical films] are assertions.  They brook no argument.  Assertion, except in the very simplest cases, is poor history.  Most of even the simple events of American history are still surrounded by argument (motive, detail, meaning).  A style that cannot embody argument cannot write good history.  (Kenneth M. Cameron 236)

232)  If history is to be correctly taught, a film can't be used as the primary medium; there needs to be the written word to back up the pictures that we see.  (James Clewley, Lehigh University)

233)  All histories . . . are suasive.  History is always history for someone, and that someone cannot be the past itself for the past does not have a self.  (Keith Jenkins, What  22)

234)  The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.   (T. S. Eliot, qtd. in Kammen, Mystic 5)

235)  History can untie our minds, our bodies, our disposition to move -- to engage life rather than contemplating it as an outsider.  It can do this by widening our views to include the silent voices of the past, so that we look behind the silence of the present.  (Howard Zinn 54)

236)  [H]istory is a source of personal identity, a means of acquiring a sense of "connectedness" with a tradition, a community, a past.  It is a way of locating ourselves in time and space, of acquiring the values and ideals by which to live our lives, and of returning to the wellsprings of our being as a people and a nation.  (William J. Bennett, Children 165)

237)  Frantz Fanon's classic investigation of national identity in The Wretched of the Earth argues that it is the purpose of national culture "to make the totality of the nation a reality to each citizen.  It is to make the history of the nation part of the personal experience of each of its citizens."  Ideally, the national culture feeds the "passionate" fantasy of the citizen to be empowered by a collective activity and identification that is also realized and preserved by a politically legitimate nation-state.  (Lauren Berlant 21)

238)  History functions to satisfy a variety of human needs: 1. History as memory and as a source of personal identity . . . . 2. History as collective immortality. . . . 3. History as cultural tradition. . . . 4. History as explanation.  (Gerda Lerner 106-7)

239)  Anna Comnena described history as a "bulwark" against the "stream of time" which carries everything away into "the depths of oblivion."  (Peter Burke 97)

240)  [There is] the "narrative of the nation," as it is told and retold in national histories, literatures, the media and popular culture.  These provide a set of stories, images, landscapes, scenarios, historical events, national symbols and rituals which stand for, or "represent," the shared experiences, sorrows, and triumphs and disasters which give meaning to the nation.  As members of such an "imagined community," we see ourselves in our mind's eye sharing in this narrative.  It lends significance and importance to our humdrum existence, connecting our everyday lives with a national destiny that preexisted us and will outlive us.  (Stuart Hall 293)

241)  Historian Michael H. Frisch has argued that the relationship between history and memory is peculiarly fractured in contemporary American life.  He is partially correct because the social diversity of the United States really means that we have multiple memories rather than a monolithic collective memory.  (Michael Kammen, Mystic 687-88)

242)  The motion picture industry must remain free…I want no censorship.  (President Franklin Roosevelt, qtd. in Mintz and Roberts 19)

243)  Even some explicitly “historical” films are chiefly important for what they say about the era in which they were made.  Cecile B. DeMille's lavish depiction of Ancient Egypt in his The Ten Commandments (1956) served as a dusty mirror to the soulless materialism he perceived in 1950s America.  (Marc C. Carnes 10)

244)  In the act of separating story from non-story, we [historians] wield the most powerful yet dangerous tool of the narrative form.  It is a commonplace of modern literary theory that the very authority with which narrative presents its vision of reality is achieved by obscuring large portions of that reality.  Narrative succeeds to the extent that it hides the discontinuities, ellipses, and contradictory experiences that would undermine the intended meaning of its story.  Whatever its overt purpose, it cannot avoid a covert exercise of power: it inevitably sanctions some voices while silencing others.  (William Cronon 1349-50)

245)  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)

246)  The justification of all historical study must ultimately be that it enhances our self-consciousness, enables us to see ourselves in perspective, and helps us towards that greater freedom which comes from self-knowledge.  (Keith Thomas, qtd. by Marwick 328)

247)  Personal ownership of the past has always been a vital strand in the ideology of all ruling classes.  (J. H. Plumb, qtd. in Nash, "American" 144)

248)  If the sin of the old history was to impose a false unity on diverse experiences and perspectives, the problem for the new history is to give voice to the diversity of perspectives while still constructing overall themes and explanatory paradigms.  (Gary B. Nash, "American" 146)

249)  History in Burckhardt's words is "the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another."  The past is intelligible to us only in light of the present; and we can fully understand the present only in the light of the past.  To enable a man to understand the society of the past and to increase his mastery over the society of the present is the dual function of history.  (Edward Hallett Carr 49)

250)  To yearn for a single, and usually simple, explanation of the chaotic materials of the past, to search for a single thread in that most tangled of all tangled skeins, is a sign of immaturity.  (Henry Steele Commager 88)

251)  When filmmakers criticize historians for applying an inappropriate set of criteria to the evaluation of film, they often cite the problem of comprehensiveness.  Too often, they argue, academics examine films with an interest in finding a complete, balanced, and detailed exposition on a subject.  Scholars expect films to explore multiple causes of behavior and events and point out other accounts of what happened, much as an historian attempts in footnotes or reflective analysis.  Academics, they claim, readily expect the same breadth of coverage they seek in a book and complain too frequently that a film "leaves out" important information or alternative explanations.  But is it valid to evaluate films by the standard of comprehensiveness?   (Robert Brent Toplin, "Filmmaker" 1213)

252)  Although nobody wants to meddle with the private and personal message of a movie, sometimes it is proper to bring a motion picture into public consciousness, at least as a beginning point for interpretation and understanding, and to free the work from the iron grip of aesthetics so that audiences will understand its cultural meaning.  For this purpose, we need to return to the power of words, and realize that sometimes a word, properly chosen and used, can be worth a thousand pictures.  (Ray B. Browne ix-x)

253)  [There is] the emergence of a hybrid national narrative that turns the nostalgic past into the disruptive "anterior" and displaces the historical present -- opens it up to other histories and incommensurable narrative subjects.  (Homi Bhabha 318)

254)  The human mind seems to require a usable past because historical memory is a key to self-identity, a way of comprehending one’s place in the stream of time, and a means of making some sense of humankind’s long story.  It is nearly impossible to step outside of time, to cut oneself off from the past as if its hand were not upon us.  The study of history, moreover, reveals the long, hard path of human striving for dignity.  (Gary Nash et. al.  8-9)

255)  Rather than generating historical amnesia, as is so often claimed, film and media may generate its opposite, an inability to stop obsessing about an event.  (Robert Burgoyne, "Prosthetic")

256)  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)

257)  Leaders continue to use the past to foster patriotism and civic duty and ordinary people continue to accept, reformulate, and ignore such messages.  (John Bodnar 20)

258)  By prosthetic memories I mean memories which do not come from a person's lived experience in any strict sense.  Prosthetic memories are memories that circulate publicly, that are