Author: Gordon S. WoodAlso known as: G S WOOD, Gordon Wood, Gordon S. Wood
1 past events. Harvard Book Store: Gordon S. Wood (April 11 at 15:00) Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome Pulitzer Prize-winning historian GORDON S. WOOD as he reflects on the historian’s craft and its place in American culture.
History is to society what memory is to the individual: without it, we don't know who we are, and we can't make wise decisions about ... (more)where we should be going. In The Purpose of the Past, Brown University historian Wood examines the sea change in the field of history through considerations of some of its most important historians and their works. His book serves as both a history of American history—neither wholly a celebration nor a critique—and an argument for its ongoing necessity.
These are both the best of times and the worst of times for American history. New currents of thought have brought refreshing and vitally necessary changes to the discipline, expanding its compass to include previously under examined and undervalued groups and subjects. At the same time, however, strains of extreme, even nihilistic, relativism have assaulted the relevance, even the legitimacy, of the historian's work. The divide between the work of academic and popular historians has widened into a chasm, separating some of the field's most important new ideas from what would give them much greater impact: any kind of real audience.
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Language: English [ others ]
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