Telling The Truth About History Joyce Appleby Summary

Telling the Truth About History by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob is not a history book but an attempt to outline a new approach to history. At first, Telling the Truth About History reads like a cry for an original, scientific historical approach that was born from the enlightenment age, but lacks sound historical data and facts. The book is unanimously their own theories and perspective, it is obvious that the authors are trying to show how all the different movements towards the telling of history originated, and how and why they all ultimately failed. It tries to argue for an objective search for the truth in history writing (historiography). But it has its agendas. First, describing and then knocking down the absolutes of scientific objectivity in history, and then going through the history of how history has been taught in the United States. In the beginning of Telling the Truth About History, the authors tell us that history is simply a search for a basic human law and development. The first laws of human development came with Isaac Newton's theory and he’s defined as the "scientist hero" or "heroic model of science." The book continues to explain how Newton’s science revealed mechanics and became the "mental

From my take the book did an okay job on in describing what historiography is about: history as a field of knowledge, what is knowable about history, and is it true? Is history a social theory used for insensitive patriotism or is it part of human experience apart from the modern concept of a nation? Is history everybody's history? They conclude with stating that everybody has a different view of history and how that history shapes their worldview. The combined agreement that history of the “White” elites cannot work anymore, we are too much of a pluralistic society for such conservative nationalist accounts to be valid. That is the theists of the