Appleby Book Review

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Appleby Book Review

October 20, 2000
Telling The Truth About History
I am writing a book review of Telling The Truth About History by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob. In this book, the authors talk about the increased skepticism and the position that relativism has lessen our ability to actually know and to write about the past. The book discusses the writing of history, and how people are struggling with the issues of what is truth. It also discusses the postmodernist movement and how future historians can avoid the mistakes by historians from the past. Telling The Truth About History gives great insight and knowledge to those who are non-historians because it looks at the dispute and inadequacy of past historical approaches to the study of history and that science is dead. I hold that history was not written in Labs and therefore cannot be compared to science. In my review I will critique the three-absolutist ideas made by Newton and Darwin.
First, Appleby, Lynn, and Jacob discussed the ideas concerning history. The first idea described how Newton and Darwin became chief examples of the Heroic model of science. Then, in a later chapter, the authors show how Newton and Darwin fell from grace and the effect this had on history as a discipline. Nevertheless, early historians felt that the way to find the truth was though science. Early historians felt that through science they could become neutral and reconstruct the past exactly as it happened (241). I analyze that Newton and Darwin made new scientific discoveries through research and mathematics. In addition, the study of History had recently become a profession and historians held experiments, math, and research, as their key to discover absolute truth in history. Science was also considered to be unbiased. This kind of approach was most commonly accepted until the early 20th Century when scientists began to become the tools of governments and political agendas. One example of this is the Manhattan Project or the space race. Newton's writings revealed that he dismissed some ideas because he feared they would lead to atheism, not because they were scientifically unsound. Darwin was discredited because he based some of his ideas on the writings of Malthus instead of scientific experiments. Malthus' ideas were more socially based than scientifically based (174-180).
The second absolute idea looked at the development of huma...

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