Nye 6
what do we do with contradictory stories?
- compare and figure out which is
right when they differ
- pick the one that matches your
politics
- come up with a third approach
- historians embrace complexity
spectrum of views of the past:
- propaganda--distortion of the past to make a present day
point
- commemoration--glorification of the past
- literature and philosophers wanting to make a point about
how the world works
- good textbooks
- historians write monographs, arguing that the facts best
fit a particular perspective
- details of the past as people at the time would have seen
it
environmental counternarrative: mills as
destroyers of nature
- cutting of the eastern forests
- damming streams: herring
run
- lack of settled community in lumbering areas
labor counternarrative:
- the mill workers are "an incipient proletariat" p. 122
- some writers like Whittier acknowledged both the progress
of the mills and the poor conditions
- employment of young women and children made
particularly good stories
- the stories of strikes became heroic
mill museums tend to present them as the pastoral birthplace
of industrialization