Historians sometimes forget that history is
continually being made and experienced before
it is studied, interpreted, and read. These latter
activities have their own history, of course, which
(5)may impinge in unexpected ways on public events.
It is difficult to predict when “new pasts” will
overturn established historical interpretations and
change the course of history.
In the fall of 1954, for example,
C. Vann
(10)Woodward delivered a lecture series at the
dogma concerning the history, continuity, and
uniformity of racial segregation in the South.
He argued that the Jim Crow laws of the late
(15)nineteenth and early twentieth centuries not
only codified traditional practice but also were
a determined effort to erase the considerable
progress made by Black people during and after
Reconstruction in the
This revisionist view
(20)of Jim Crow legislation grew in part from the
research that Woodward had done for the NAACP
legal campaign during its preparation for Brown
v. Board of Education. The Supreme Court had
issued its ruling in this epochal desegregation case
(25)a few months before Woodward’s lectures.
The lectures were soon published as a book,
The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Ten years
later, in a preface to the second revised edition,
Woodward confessed with ironic modesty that the
(30)first edition “had begun to suffer under some of the
handicaps that might be expected in a history of the
American Revolution published in 1776.” That was
a bit like hearing Thomas Paine apologize for the
timing of his pamphlet Common Sense, which had
(35)a comparable impact. Although
Common Sense
also had a mass readership, Paine had intended
to reach and inspire: he was not a historian, and
thus not concerned with accuracy or the dangers of
historical anachronism.
Yet, like Paine, Woodward
(40)had an unerring sense of the revolutionary moment,
and of how historical evidence could undermine the
mythological tradition that was crushing the dreams
of new social possibilities. Martin Luther King, Jr.
testified to the profound effect of The Strange
(45)Career of Jim Crow on the civil rights movement
by praising the book and quoting it frequently.
加大红色的两句话对理解全文至关重要，可我都没搞懂是什么意思，哪位能给翻译一下！把cd以前关于这篇文章的讨论也都看了，还是没有定论。
| 欢迎光临 ChaseDream (https://forum.chasedream.com/) | Powered by Discuz! X3.3 |