Truth in History

by Oscar Handlin

Overview

One of the most eminent historians of our time offers here a perceptive guide to the study of history. Truth in History teaches how to read, how to analyze, how to discriminate. It is as helpful to the reader whose history is created daily in the news as it is to the professional historian whose field is in a crisis of disarray.

A Pulitzer Prize winner and mentor for more than a generation of American historians, Oscar Handlin instructs his readers in the fundamentals of his field. He tells us how to deal with evidence, how to discern patterns amid flux, how to situate ourselves in history, and how to recognize where fact shades subtly into opinion. He combines a historian's knowledge with a historiographer's breadth and a philosopher's temperament. He is concerned with a historian's limitations and with the ways one can operate honestly withinthose limitations. He brings a full appreciation of the past to his evaluation of what is modern. And while carefully examining recent developments in his discipline, he culls genuine achievements from the trends that confuse originality with true worth.

Handlin everywhere enlivens his discussion with brilliant details. As he pursues broad definitions of history and its uses, he also attends to specific subjects, showing how they bear directly on each other and on his concerns. He deals with Populism, capitalism, laissez faire, the two-party system, the New History, ethnicity, and roots, treating all with the flair of an accomplished man of letters. Only a scholar of Handlin's experience and expertise could have brought such a wealth of particular facts to an issue of such general importance--truth in history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674910263
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	01/01/1979
Series:	Harvard Paperbacks Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	450
Product dimensions:	(w) x (h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Oscar Handlin, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, was Carl M. Loeb University Professor, Emeritus, at Harvard University. He was the editor of This Was America.

Table of Contents

Preface. The Abuses of History

Personal Reflections on a Calling

1. A Discipline in Crisis

2. Living in a Valley

The Central Themes of American History

3. A History of American History

4. Theories of Historical Interpretation

5. Historical Criticism

6. An Instance of Criticism

Dealing with the Evidence

7. How to Read a Word

8. How to Count a Number

9. Seeing and Hearing

10. History in a World of Knowledge

Persistent Themes and Hard Facts

11. Political Theory and Popular Thought

12. Man and Magic

13. Good Guys and Bad

14. The Two-Party System

The Uses of History

15. The Diet of a Ravenous Public

16. Ethnicity and the New History

17. The Uses of History

Acknowledgments

Index

Editorial Reviews

Immensely rewarding. This is the distillate of a well-furnished and original mind. Running through this book is Handlin's strong sense of the morality of the historian. Above all, he reiterates the importance of respect for fact.

Christian Science Monitor

By any standard Oscar Handlin ranks among the most influential historians of the American past…Truth in History…provide[s] the most complete statement of Handlin's approach that we can hope to get. In these essays, written over many years but here reworked into a remarkably unified whole, Handlin examines the limits and possibilities of historical thought.

New Republic

"Using his considerable talents as both scholar and critic, [Handlin] offers both thoughtful reflections on American historiography since its earliest days and harsh attacks upon those modern scholars who have, he claims, forgotten that the historian's first task is to search for 'truth.' . . . Few historians will read this book without finding idas and judgments with which they will disagree. But neither can any historian afford to ignore the challenging and eloquent warnings of one of the profession's most respected voices. The historian's task is, as Handlin claims, to pursue truth. But it is also to provoke thought. This important and controversial book will certainly do that." —Alan Brinkley, Boston Globe "On almost any page, no matter how randomly chosen, a historian of local, national, or global history can find chastening insights and strong towlines to his disciplin in Handlin's voluminous recapitulation of what historical inquiry can be and what it should not be. . . . This is a major, demanding collection of essays and mongraphs guided by Handlin's disillusionment with historians who settle for less than ineluctability." —Booklist "[A] most useful, carefully written and sometimes provocative book of essays and monographs. . . . Handlin's cautionary call to 'objectivity' will make waves." —Publishers Weekly "Why study history—and how. . . . Handlin discusses just such difficult and enduring questions in this worthy collection of essays. . . . Handlin tells us that there's more than one way to view a mountain, and even for those living halfway up it's a long way to the peak. So why bother with the climb? For Handlin the answer is the truth in history: his and our recognition that 'men and women walked the earth' and that 'though it takes a whole wide world of knowledge to know them, they are knowable.' A precious, hard-won recognition." —Kirkus "To understand Truth in History you have to take it personally. Its seventeen essays, informed by Oscar Handlin's robust and undisputed mastery of the craft and subject of history, articulate his unmistakable disappointment and outrage at the recent practices of American historians. . . . The best part of Handlin's writing compels us to respond honestly to his candid and generous jeremiad. . . . This sustaining vision . . . must strike a reader with its emotional force and its compelling account. . . . The scholar who defends and exemplifies this understanding of historical studies writes essays worth reading." —Robert Dawidoff, Reviews in American History "[Truth in History] does provide the most complete statement of Handlin's approach that we can hope to get. In these essays, written over many years but here reworked into a remarkably unified whole, Handlin examines the limits and possibilities of historical thought." —Jack N. Rakove, The New Republic "Oscar Handlin's Truth in History is a singular distillation of the wisdom, unnerving knowledge, and experience of a master historian who after forty years in the academic ttrenches still insists that mere facts, not existential conceits, are the fundament of history." —John P. Roche, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy

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