Historic Consciousness

Hartford Web Publishing is not the author of the documents in World History Archives and does not presume to validate their accuracy or authenticity nor to release their copyright.

• The social value in general of historiography

Asking the big why questions: History: a new age of reason

By Eric Hobsbawm, Le Monde diplomatique, December 2004. It is time to promote a revived idea of history and to create a coalition of reason to respond to the urgent need for renewed historical research into the evolution of human beings and their societies.

Attacking Our Memory

By John Pilger, Dissident Voice, 17 February 2005. The history the media knows, or chooses to know, subject to such amnesia and omission that it produces a world view as seen only through a one-way moral mirror. The unerring assumption is that “we” in the dominant west have moral standards superior to “them”. Why the historical amnesia?

America's Blinders

By Howard Zinn, Common Dreams, 21 March 2006. There are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture, and which help explain the vulnerability of the press and of the citizenry to outrageous lies. One is in the dimension of time, that is, an absence of historical perspective. The other is in the dimension of space, that is, an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism.