Author Topic: “Interpretive contests essential in efforts to advance historical understanding"  (Read 14440 times)

Joe Carillo

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In a recent article in the National Endowment for the Humanities website, American historian James M. Banner Jr. makes this assertion: “In the infancy of their intellectual pursuit, historians were engaged in what we know as ‘revisionist history’—writing coexisting, diverse, and sometimes sharply clashing accounts of various subjects, accounts that challenged and sought to alter what had been written about them before.” For this reason, he argues, “historians take it as indisputable that interpretive contests are inherent in all of their efforts to advance historical understanding.”

                                                           IMAGE CREDIT: NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES
“The conversion of Roman emperor Constantine to Christianity in 312 CE led
to the most transformative historiographic shift in the West.”
Wikimedia

"What’s more," Banner explains, "historians are of the abiding conviction that robust, free arguments about the realities, significance, and meaning of the past should be cherished as an integral element of an open society like the one ours strives to be."

Read “All History Is Revisionist History” in the National Endowment for the Humanities website now!     
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« Last Edit: August 05, 2022, 10:50:52 PM by Joe Carillo »