Who owns history?
Subtitle: rethinking the past in a changing world
By: Eric Foner.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Published: 2002
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 233
Subjects: United States -- History -- Philosophy; United States -- Historiography; United States -- Politics and government -- Philosophy
Description: ""History," wrote James Baldwin, "does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do."".

"Rarely has Baldwin's insight been more forcefully confirmed than in our current conflict-ridden times. History itself has become a matter of public controversy as Americans clash over the way it is represented in museums, in the flying of the Confederate flag, or in the proposals for paying reparations for slavery. So whose history is being written? Who owns it?".

"In Who Owns History? Eric Foner proposes his answers to these and other questions about the historian's relationship to the world of the past and the future. He reconsiders his own earlier ideas and those of the pathbreaking historian Richard Hofstadter. He also examines international changes during the past two decades - globalization, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of apartheid in South Africa - and their effects on historical consciousness.

He concludes with new considerations of the enduring but often misunderstood legacies of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 205-219) and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Preface x; title: PART I; title: THE POLITICS OF HISTORY; title: AND HISTORIANS; title: 1. My Life as a Historian 3; title: 2. The Education of Richard Hofstadter 25; title: PART II; title: RETHINKING HISTORY; title: IN A CHANGING WORLD; title: 3. American Freedom in a Global Age 49; title: 4. The Russians Write a New History 75; title: 5. "We Must Forget the Past":; title: History in the New South Africa 88; title: 6. Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? 110; title: PART III; title: THE ENDURING CIVIL WAR; title: 7. Who Is an American? 149; title: 8. Blacks and the U.S. Constitution 167; title: 9. Ken Burns and the Romance of Reunion 189; title: Notes 205; title: Index 221.