After the fact : the art of historical detection

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Bibliographic Information

After the fact : the art of historical detection

James West Davidson, Mark Hamilton Lytle

McGraw-Hill, c1992

3rd edition

Available at  / 3 libraries

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Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

This text uses 15 dramatic episodes in American history to show students how historians go about the business of interpreting the past. It discusses historical methods within the context of an historical narrative so that students may learn about American history at the same time as seeing how historians use a variety of evidence (diaries, letters, photographs and records) and methods to explain the past. This edition contains a new chapter on the Vietnam experience that examines how Hollywood incorporated the horror of My Lai into their mythic formulations and how dramatic films can be used as historical evidence. Some chapters have been substantially revised or rewritten to take into account recently published material - "The Invisible Pioneers" (chapter 5), "Sacco and Vanzetti" (chapter 10), "The Decision to Drop the Bomb" (chapter 12).

Table of Contents

  • The strange death of Silas Deane - the problem of selecting evidence
  • serving time in Virginia - the perspectives of evidence in social history
  • the visible and invisible worlds of Salem - studying crisis at the community level
  • declaring independence - the strategies of documentary analysis
  • Jackson's frontier and Turner's - history and grand theory
  • the invisible pioneers - ecological transformations along the Western frontier
  • the madness of John Brown - the uses of psychohistory
  • the view for the bottom rail - oral history and the freedmen's point of view
  • the mirror with a memory - photographic evidence and the urban scene
  • USDA government inspected - the jungle of political history
  • Sacco and Vanzetti - the case of history versus law
  • Huey Generis - the Louisiana kingfish and "great man" history
  • the decision to drop the bomb - the uses of models in history
  • from Rosie to Lucy - the mass media and images of women in the 1950s
  • instant Watergate - footnoting "The Final Days"
  • where trouble comes - history and myth in the films of Vietnam.

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