The Boisterous Sea of Liberty: Summary of Central Summary



The Boisterous Sea of Liberty: Summary of Central Summary

Introduction

Whatever else the investigations of the President have uncovered, they have yielded thousands of sources--transcripts, letters, memos, audio- and videotapes--which Americans have devoured with glee. Documents of all sorts, in fact, are more widely available than ever.

As the Starr report demonstrated, the Internet increasingly serves as a distribution center for a variety of texts. It offers nearly immediate access to newly released material and features countless sites that contain unedited historical sources (Davis and Mintz, 2000). The Library of Congress alone will have millions of texts and artifacts digitized and online by the year 2000. Although documents arriving at 52,000 bytes per second deprive readers of the feel and smell of coarse and musty pages, as a result of the Internet more people than ever will have access to the materials out of which we understand and interpret the American past. This paper presents the summary of the book mentioned in the list of references.

How Did The Politics Of Slavery Create The South?

There is something inviting about primary sources: Through them we establish an original relationship with the past. They allow us to hear the voices and sense the textures of another time and place. They also serve as a medium through which the past continues to resonate in the present. Examining the sources, historians glean those facts with which they begin to construct their narratives. A novelist can invent facts but a historian must find them (Davis and Mintz, 2000).

Yet the documents do not speak for themselves; we make them speak. Shelby Foote, novelist and historian, often quotes John Keats's declaration that "a fact is not a truth until you love it." Turning facts into truths, moving from document toward meaning, is the essence of the historian's craft. It is what makes history so compelling. It is the reason there can never be a single "definitive" work on a subject. And it is the flashpoint for controversy. In the past decade, the most contentious public debates about the past have pivoted on the selection, interpretation and presentation of texts and artifacts in two Smithsonian exhibitions--"The West as America" and "The Enola Gay." The facts, whether westward migration or the dropping of the atomic bomb, are not at issue, but the larger troths about these events are deeply contested.

To say that we make documents speak is not to say that we can make them say whatever we like. A novelist such as Tim O'Brien, in The Things They Carried, can brilliantly explore the tensions between what he calls "happening truth" and "story truth" and, in pursuit of the latter, encourage us to disregard the facts as culled from the documentary record. "A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth," writes O'Brien. Historians, of course, must stay true to the evidentiary record. We cannot invent or bury or twist the facts to fit ...