Title: Memory and Understanding U.S. Foreign Relations
Abstract: It used to be obvious. History happened. People's memories were true or false or some mixture of the two. The historian's task consisted of discovering what happened and shaping a coherent narrative. That job often involved exploring participants' memories of actual events. But historians regularly affirmed that contemporaneous, documentary (customarily written) evidence gave a truer, more faithful, or more accurate account of what actually happened than did individuals' fallible memories. Historians considered the written record produced at the time to be rich and immutable. Traditionally-trained historians did not dismiss or ignore personal memories, but they were on their guard to consider them malleable, fragile, and, worst of all in the positivist tradition, inaccurate.
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-01-19
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 7
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